Roommate CFO

Roommate CFO Dashboard
Roommates' transaction history view

Inspiration

Splitting rent and utilities should be simple, but the work usually falls on one roommate: tracking balances, reminding people to pay, and deciding when a bill can be paid. We wanted to see what happens when the household has a CFO that everyone can talk to, without asking anyone to give up control of their money.

What it does

Roommate CFO is an agent for shared household finances. Roommates contribute equally to a shared wallet, then ask the agent about bills, balances, and proposed spending through a familiar chat interface. The agent handles routine payments while making bigger decisions visible to the whole household. Instead of an opaque transfer, each roommate can see why money moved and who approved it.

How we built it

Next.js and TypeScript for the app, Python for the agent logic, Grok for interpreting roommate requests, Photon for the chat experience, and Ripple/XRPL for the wallet and payment side. We built it in Cursor. The key design choice was keeping the language interface separate from payment authorization: understanding "pay the utility bill" isn't, by itself, enough to move money.

Challenges we ran into

The hard part isn't splitting a number evenly. It's defining when an agent should act, when it should ask the roommates, and how to explain its decision. A misunderstood message can become a real payment, so we made that boundary explicit instead of treating every chat instruction as permission to spend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We took a problem every roommate deals with and shaped it into an agent-first product with one clear rule: shared money needs shared visibility. Roommate CFO connects a conversational interface to wallet-based payments while keeping the human decision in view.

What we learned

An agent for money needs more than a clever prompt. It needs rules for who can authorize a payment, a way to handle disagreement, and a record roommates can check later. If roommates can't tell what the agent plans to do, they won't trust it with a bill.

What's next for Roommate CFO

Stronger approval rules, handling late contributions and bill disputes, and an easier-to-audit payment history. Before real money, we'd test security, failed transactions, roommates moving out, and the other edge cases of shared housing.