Savelah

Screenshot of the process of logging expenses
Screenshot of profile page which shows bank account balances and upcoming trips user is saving up for
Screenshot of travel page, where flight/hotel are sourced for based on budget
Screenshot of list of expenses over the days
Screenshot of suggested savings

Inspiration

Manually inputting expenses into a budgeting app is cumbersome for most people and many more lack the discipline to regularly update their expenditure. We are transiting into a cashless future where payments are digitized. At Savelah, we believe it is time to combine the convenience of technology with the good intention of enriching the lives of people into an app that promotes savings so that you can spend on valuable experiences.

What it does

(1) Savelah syncs your payments from commonly used platforms such as PayPal and ApplePay into one seamless user interface. It extracts data from transaction history and categorizes the expenses according to their nature which include household expenses and food expenditure (CapitalOne's Nessi API). The app also aims to encourage the user to keep within a preset budget by reminding the user when they are overspending. (2) Savelah is a budgeting assistant. By tracking the frequency of your expenditure (IBM Watson API), Savelah offers cheaper alternatives to the user's frequented places without compromising on quality and convenience. (3) Savelah encourages the user to immerse in new experiences without burning a hole in the pocket. Whenever there is an excess in budget, Savelah automatically channels this balance into a "Travel Rewards" account. With this information and past travel records, Amadeus suggests new travel locations for the user.

How we built it

With our bear hands. By identifying the use cases of our application, we were able to identify relevant APIs to enrich the user experience. Through the integration of the APIs into python script, we were also able to determine the viability of our idea. We then focused our efforts into accentuating the use cases in a simple to use interface..

Challenges I ran into

The team was overly ambitious and had grandiose ideas. However, during the hackathon, we realized that the scale of implementation was beyond our skill set. Hence, we pivoted towards an idea that was more easily implementable and yet possessed the potential for far reaching impacts.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As a team without a CS major and little experience in hackathons, we are proud that we were able to link up the APIs and get them to work together as desired. Although we do not have a full app, we managed to come up with a wireframe of what we envision the app to be and also the proof of concept(Python code) highlighted the possibility of a working app in the near future.

What I learned

We acquired programming skills, especially with API implementation in Python, Javascript and JSON. During this short frame of time with little guidance, we also had to learn many technical skills on the go.