SpendWiseAI

SmartWiseAI is a cloud-native personal finance tracker that helps users manage budgets, log expenses, and receive AI-powered financial insights.

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SpendWiseAI – Smarter Budgeting with AI

What Inspired Us

Managing personal finances can be overwhelming—unexpected expenses, poor tracking, and no real insight into spending habits. We wanted to build something that not only tracks spending but also helps users budget smarter using AI. That’s how SpendWiseAI came to life.

What We Learned

This project gave us hands-on experience with several AWS services and modern full-stack development. We learned to work with:

  • AWS Amplify – for CI/CD and hosting
  • AWS Lambda – for serverless backend logic
  • Amazon API Gateway – to expose REST endpoints
  • Amazon Cognito – for user authentication
  • Amazon RDS (MySQL) – to manage user data and transactions
  • Amazon Bedrock – to generate AI-powered budget insights
  • Amazon SES – to send emails like budget reports
  • Amazon VPC – to securely connect AWS services

How We Built It

  • Designed and hosted the frontend using React + Amplify
  • Built REST APIs with Lambda triggered via API Gateway
  • Integrated Cognito for secure login/signup
  • Stored budget and expense data in RDS
  • Used Bedrock models to generate personalized financial advice
  • Sent alerts and summaries via SES
  • Deployed critical services within a VPC for added security

Challenges We Faced

  • Integrating Bedrock: We initially struggled with invoking models from within Lambda, especially with VPC and IAM permissions. After multiple iterations, we successfully resolved the access and invocation issues.
  • Cost Optimization: We worked on ensuring the architecture remained affordable while using multiple AWS services, especially during testing.

Conclusion

SpendWiseAI helped us learn how to build a fully functional, AI-powered app on AWS. It was a challenging but rewarding experience. We’re now more confident in designing scalable, secure, and intelligent cloud applications.

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