PNTS | Devpost

PNTS Landing Page
PNTS Product Overview

Inspiration

75.7% of American consumers own a credit card. Of these card owners, each of them owns an average of 3.7 credit cards. With cash-back percentages, points, and seasonal credit card promotions, it is difficult for consumers to determine which card to use for each purchase. We decided to build PNTS to address this issue and to make sure our users don't miss out on potential savings and benefits on their purchases.

What it does

1) Vendor Identification Using the Google Places API, we use the user's location to identify nearby vendors and pre-load credit card recommendations for seamless user experience. We also offer other ways of vendor identification like manual entry or logo classification using Google's Vision API.

2) Credit Card Optimization We used Google Cloud's Firebase to build a database of credit card points, mile rewards, cashback percentages, and seasonal promotions. Using this data, our algorithm will choose the best credit card for the purchase. Our algorithm also accounts for user preferences (miles vs cashback vs points, etc).

3) User Tracking PNTS tracks user spending data and catalogs the benefit they have received from using the app. This allows us to provide tailored credit card recommendations for our users.

How we built it

PNTS is built using React Native and specifically Expo, an open-source framework and toolchain for React Native applications. We've utilized various APIs, namely Google's Places and Vision APIs, along with Firebase in order to simplify store identification and keep track of an extensive database of credit cards and their associated rewards programs.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had no formal experience using React Native but wanted to use CalHacks as an opportunity to learn. While we experienced hiccups setting up and working with a new framework, the sheer amount of learning over such a short period of time made the endeavor worth it for us.