PrintMATE

Get printouts in the most convenient way possible, for prices you set, without owning a printer.

Comment

Inspiration

In many places, people don’t have printers in their homes. Especially during work from home, people have to resort to printing from local printing stores or just buying a printer. Often the prints from these stores are not high quality. Furthermore, since printer companies operate on the razor and blades model, it isn't feasible to keep purchasing printer ink. Inkjet printer ink costs on an average anywhere from $0.23 to $3 to manufacture. However, they are sold at 20 to even 300 times their price in most cases, at anywhere from $60 to over $250.

What it does

PrintMATE offers a mobile application that allows users to request prints from people with printers, and get them delivered as soon as possible. They simply need to go on the app, upload their document, set the parameters (color or B/W, number of copies, range, etc.), set their budget (the price they are intending to pay) and place their order. Once that is done, their request is sent out to a general pool of requests that can be viewed by Printers, who are entities using their printers to print documents for others and make money doing so.

How we built it

PrintMATE was built with the following:

  • Swift: For the iOS front and back end.
  • Firebase: Firestore to store the user and order data, and Storage for storing the files.
  • ReactJS: For the website.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was to manage the state of the data across so many screens on the iOS application. We used ObservableObjects, EnvironmentObjects and PropertyWrappers, along with proper state-management architectures to deal with problems of rendering data in a memory efficient way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Efficiently managing data across screens
  • Making the app look sleek and professional through minimalistic design principles
  • Building a Minimum Viable Product
  • Having a proper business model and lean canvas

What we learned

One of the biggest takeaways was the lessons learnt from overcoming the challenges mentioned above. While building PrintMATE, we approached it as though we were building a real product that will be used by people, hence we tried to follow the MVP design process to keep things as simple and efficient as possible.

What's next for PrintMATE

This is just the beginning for PrintMATE.

  • Beta testing and release: After a few changes to the app, we will release it for beta testing to select people, following which we plan to release it on the App Store.
  • Expansion to other platforms: Soon, we are hoping to get Android and Web versions up and running as well.
  • Ideas for version 2 and beyond: Apart from that, we have plenty of ideas that we want to implement in the short term such as user management system, payments system using Stripe, user verification, two-way delivery confirmation system etc., and a few ideas for the long term, such as building user and price recommendation systems.
Share this project:

Updates