SmartSpend

With everyone's budget being impacted by the toll of high inflation, our site offers a one-stop-shop for saving on groceries. You input your location and your grocery list, we tell you where to shop!

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Inspiration

Our team wanted to address the issue of inflation. The prices for groceries have been increasing astronomically, severely affecting lower-income families and individuals. We decided to create a web application to make saving money on food an easier process overall. Most grocery lists are pretty stale, simply a plain list of items you want to buy. What if you wanted to know which grocery store had the best prices, or just wanted to shop at the closest grocery store?

What it does

SmartSpend lets you create a grocery list, and asks for your location and your preferred radius of how far you want to go shopping. Then SmartSpend will return the best location to shop at based on your preferences. You then enter your email to receive the grocery list, so you can view it on your phone while you shop!

How we built it

We started off by brainstorming using Figjam. Next, our designer sketched some mockups and created a high-fidelity prototype on Figma. The frontend of the site was built using React, and for the backend we used Python and CockroachDB for web scraping and the database, respectively.

Challenges we ran into

CockroachDB was a hassle to set up initially. The use of the Google Maps API introduced some complexity. Using a large variety of supermarkets was very time-consuming. Using React introduced many concepts we had not worked on before, such as generating a grocery list of variable length.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The API interactions of the application are high-speed and make it very easy for the user to find the needed information. The use of CockroachDB allowed for great cross-platform mobility. The frontend, though not fully implemented, was well designed. The planning of the project was superb and everyone understood their roles within the group.

What we learned

Improved understanding of the communication between the frontend and backend of a site. The use of various database technologies.

What's next for SmartSpend

Allowing users to set preferred supermarkets, account creation to see how much money saved, settings for best value rather than cheapest option, keeping track of items users regularly add to their lists to give them recommend products, and much more!

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