Savr-E

Savr-E is a web app built by students, for students, that helps compare the cost of dining out versus cooking at home. With fast food prices skyrocketing, students should eat smarter, and save money

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Inspiration

  • We were inspired by our shared struggle to eat a sustainable amount of food while staying within our budgets as college students.

What it does

  • the website prompts you to select a fast food chain to eat from, and add menu items to your order as if you were about to purchase them. Those items are then compared to their grocery store equivalent prices based on the serving sizes of the ingredients. The price you'd spend on one serving at the grocery store vs what you'd spend eating at the restaurant are both displayed so you can now see which option is more cost efficient.

How we built it

  1. We began by researching price fluctuations at fast food establishments over recent years to gain a clear, data-driven understanding of how serious this issue has become. This helped us focus our goal on addressing the growing affordability gap in everyday dining options.
  2. Next, we used Google AI Studio to prompt our app idea and generated a basic framework of code that could support our concept.
  3. Using publicly available menu information online, we manually created a menu database within our code, allowing our app functions to pull from a realistic set of menu items and prices.
  4. After refining and adjusting our code, we integrated it into the Gemini API "starter app" generator, debugging and improving the app’s functionality until we were fully satisfied with the final result.
  5. Finally, we created a GitHub repository and set up a custom domain for our app using GitHub Pages, allowing us to host and share a live, interactive version of our project online for easy access and future development.

Challenges we ran into

  • With this being our first Hackathon, my teammate and I are both beginner hackers and have never created websites, apps, or worked with these coding languages to a great degree. This lack of experience was a major setback for us but it gave us motivation to outwork our competition and focus on attacking small problems one by one. Debugging took up most of our work time with us spending several hours trying to eliminate errors and malfunctions in our code.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
  • We are proud that we participated in our first hackathon and gave it our all. additionally, we are impressed at ourselves for actually following through with an idea we set our minds on, regardless of our lack of prior experience or resources.
What we learned
  • My teammate and I learned how to build our own website and what it takes to participate In a hackathon ####### What's next for Savr-E
  • Ideally, we envision our app having access to all menu items available online, rather than being limited to a manually entered list. Similar to how platforms like Postmates or DoorDash let users browse any restaurant menu, we dream of giving users the ability to search for any dish on any menu through their device. From there, the app would automatically generate a list of grocery ingredients needed to recreate those dishes at home, while also showing the most local grocery stores where those items are available.

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