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Inspiration

Students across Uganda find housing through WhatsApp groups and word of mouth. They cannot compare price, distance and safety in one place, they discover hidden costs after paying, and they have no safe way to warn others about bad management. Our user-interface design coursework on student accommodation showed how stressful and risky this search is, so we built a solution.

What it does

CampusNest lets a student pick any Ugandan university and see nearby hostels ranked by a transparent match score built from price, distance, safety and student reviews, with the breakdown always visible. Compare up to three hostels side by side, with the best value highlighted

Semester cost calculator covering rent, deposit, utilities, transport, food and data, checked against the student's budget
Survival badges for electricity included, backup generator, water tank and shuttle route
Hostel communities for anonymous reviews, warnings about management and second-hand items, plus a roommate board
University pages for 13 universities with prices, a map and nearby hostels
Landlords list rooms by dropping a pin on the map and uploading photos
Low-data mode that hides photos, maps and animation to save data bundles

How we built it

React and Vite on the frontend (Netlify), Python and Flask with SQLite on the backend (Render). Maps use Leaflet and OpenStreetMap, distances use the haversine formula, and the 3D effects are pure CSS so the site stays light.

Challenges we ran into

Free hosting deletes uploaded files, so we moved demo photos into the deployed frontend
The free server sleeps, so we added a wake-up message with automatic retry
University map pins are approximate and can be moved on each university's page
Most hostels are sample data for the demo, and landlords add real ones ## Accomplishments that we're proud of A match score students can understand, a full landlord-to-student flow, and a design that works on slow, expensive connections. ## What we learned Designing for low data and unreliable infrastructure matters as much as features, and visible, honest scoring builds trust.