Pricey

With rising inflation, residents may not be able to afford higher priced items. Our app tracks the cost of frequently purchased goods to keep customers aware of the best prices and market trends.

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Inspiration

When coming up with an idea for an app back in November of 2022 we had many ideas. Our team members had many unique ideas. One stood out as something that had to be solved. Inflation was the problem. During November grocery prices were going up because of the supply chain back up. Gas prices were also going out of control as the United States blocked imports of Russian oil. After many rough sketches and meetings we created Pricey!

What it does

Pricey is an android application that gathers many consumer-prompted products across stores and be tracks prices so that consumers know when the product they seek is good to buy. The app is not only a valuable price-tracking application for grocery goods, but also for anything else you may want to buy from big-brand stores, gasoline prices up to the specific day, and nearby real estate. With hundreds of items, and the optimized storage and data aggregation to fit millions of datasets, the app is ready to grow as the user-base grows!

How we built it

The app is built on a ReactJS framework with a JSON bin for data storage and python Flask APIs to create easily callable functions to implement the webscraping features. Using ReactJS for the Pricey's frontend provides a responsive and interactive UI, as well as an efficient rendering of dynamic variables and information that may be updating every minute. The use of a JSON bin for data storage gives a straightforward approach to store product and pricing information, as well as make connection with our Flask API backend and our ReactJS frontend.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge that we faced as a team was being able to communicate through soft platforms. As covid is still very prevalent in today's society we have used Discord to hold all our meetings. This was a tough challenge being able to communicate as virtual communication isn’t the same as being in person. We overcame this by giving each other times that we would be available. We also had a hard time creating the framework of the app. This app was built from scratch. While it gives us freedom to build what we please, it's also very hard to manage. At any moment the app could completely crash because one line of code was not correct. Over time we learned how to manage our app and learned effective app management skills.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One major accomplishment we had during this development process was the mastery of web scraping. Web scraping was one of the major center points of our app and we learned how to use it effectively. This allows us to grab information anywhere at any time accurately. We also learned how to make an appealing UI. In the past we used Thunkable to create our apps which severely limited what we could do. Now with ReactJS we can create whatever we want without having to be limited, which was a huge step as individual developers.

What we learned

Throughout this competition, we learned a lot about React.js, webscraping, firebase, json, APIs, and cron-jobs. Since we built our app from the ground up, we had to start from the basics and learn about React.js, our coding platform. Webscraping was an essential function of our app, and we learned a lot about the concept and how to implement it in our app, which we used APIs for. We had to create the API and also use it in the app, as well as use cron-jobs to schedule API callings. We also needed a place to store our data, so we learned about firebase and jsons to store things like user data and item data. Along with learning many new technical skills, we also learned how to communicate and coordinate with each other to get our app done efficiently and effectively.

What's next for Pricey

First, we are planning on adding more stores to be able to webscrape, since we only have Staples and Bjs right now, which will allow for people to track prices from a wider variety of stores. Next we are also planning on adding more types of energy into the energy page such as electricity or natural gas. Lastly, we are planning on implementing machine learning to be able to let people take pictures of prices in stores and add them to our app, so that we can help people who are shopping in person too.

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