Roost

Home Page with the Dragon
Adding Purchases and Scanning Receipts
Weekly Budget Customization
Ask dragon AI feature

Inspiration

Roost was inspired by a simple problem: budgeting apps feel like chores. Coming into college, we all struggled with managing our budgets and wished there was a better, more engaging way to stay on top of spending. We wanted to make personal finance feel less stressful and more rewarding, especially for students and young adults who struggle to stay consistent with saving. We also drew inspiration from Qualcomm’s Dragonwing, which influenced our decision to use a dragon as a symbol of growth, progress, and performance.

What it does

Roost is a gamified budgeting app that helps users track receipts, monitor spending, and stay within budget through an engaging, interactive experience. Users can scan receipts to automatically log and categorize expenses, receive real-time alerts to avoid overspending, and stay motivated by growing a virtual dragon that reflects their financial habits. The app also provides personalized insights to help users make smarter financial decisions.

How we built it

We built Dragon Budget natively for Android using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose to create a fluid, modern, and gamified user interface. To make expense tracking completely frictionless, we integrated CameraX and Google ML Kit's Text Recognition API to instantly extract purchase amounts from receipt scans. For data privacy and performance, all financial data and game states are securely persisted on the device using a Room Database. Our biggest technical achievement was powering our "Ask Dragon" financial assistant entirely offline by deploying the Google Gemma LLM directly to the device. By using Google LiteRT and configuring native C++ library paths to leverage the Qualcomm QNN delegate, we successfully hardware-accelerated the LLM on the device's NPU for lightning-fast, private, and context-aware responses

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting the camera and receipt scanning to work reliably. We used LiteRT and Gemma for on-device processing, but integrating them smoothly required significant debugging and optimization. Ensuring the camera captured clear, usable images while maintaining fast and responsive performance was difficult, especially across different lighting conditions and receipt formats. Balancing accuracy with real-time performance on-device was a key challenge we had to overcome.

DISCLAIMER: THE APK IS ON GITHIB NOT ON DEVPOST, THANK YOU!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the UI and overall experience design, which makes the app feel engaging and motivating rather than just another budgeting app that is hard to stick with. We focused heavily on making the interface intuitive and rewarding, so users actually want to come back and use it consistently. We’re also proud of creating a product that makes budgeting feel engaging rather than burdensome. The integration of receipt scanning with real-time tracking works smoothly, and the dragon-based reward system adds a unique, memorable layer to the experience. We also successfully tied gamification to meaningful financial behaviors instead of making it feel superficial.

What we learned

We learned that building for behavior change is very different from building for functionality. Small UX decisions, like reducing friction in input or providing timely feedback, have a big impact on user engagement. We also gained experience working with on-device AI using LiteRT and Gemma, real-time data systems, and designing systems that balance fun with utility.

What's next for Roost

Next, we want to improve the intelligence of our financial insights by making recommendations more personalized and predictive. We also plan to expand the gamification system with more progression features and customization, and improve receipt recognition accuracy across different formats. Ultimately, we aim to make Roost a daily-use financial companion that users genuinely enjoy interacting with. We have our slideshow link with a baby "demo" in the try it out links section of this page on devpost.