Sprout 🌱

Grow your wealth, not your anxiety.

Inspiration

As first-year college students, we noticed how overwhelming personal finance can feel — especially for young women navigating budgeting, investing, student expenses, and financial independence for the first time. Many existing finance apps felt intimidating, overly technical, or designed for experienced investors rather than beginners.

We wanted to create something approachable, calming, and educational: a finance app that feels less like managing spreadsheets and more like nurturing growth. That idea became Sprout, a gamified financial wellness platform where your financial habits directly help your virtual plant grow.

What It Does

Sprout combines budgeting, investing education, and habit-building into one interactive experience.

Users can:

Track spending habits through an AI-powered receipt scanner
Learn investing concepts through personalized financial literacy quizzes
Receive personalized beginner-friendly investment recommendations based on their goals and risk preferences
View real-time ETF market data
Grow a customizable pixel-art plant based on healthy financial behavior
Build confidence around money in a low-stress environment

Our goal was to turn financial literacy from something intimidating into something rewarding and visually engaging.

How We Built It

Frontend

We built the UI using:

React
Tailwind CSS

This allowed us to rapidly create a responsive, mobile-first interface optimized for Gen-Z users.

Backend & Authentication

We used Supabase for:

authentication
PostgreSQL database storage
secure session management

AI Integrations

We integrated Google Gemini AI for two major features:

AI Receipt Scanner

Users upload receipt images, and Gemini’s multimodal vision model extracts:

merchant names
prices
line items
totals

The AI then categorizes purchases into:

Needs
Wants
Savings

This removes the friction of manual expense tracking.

AI Financial Quiz Generator

Gemini also dynamically generates unique financial literacy quizzes covering:

ETFs
IRAs & 401(k)s
bonds
HSAs
investing fundamentals

This keeps every learning session fresh and personalized.

Real-Time Market Data

Using the Alpaca Markets API, we integrated:

live ETF prices
historical chart data
market status detection

This helped us create beginner-friendly investing dashboards using real financial data.

Gamification System

One of our favorite features was building the custom pixel-art growth engine:

Plants evolve from seed → sprout → bloom
Growth is tied to financial progress and healthy habits
CSS hue rotation creates unique plant color variations dynamically

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was balancing financial accuracy with simplicity. We wanted the app to educate users without overwhelming them with complicated financial terminology.

Another challenge was integrating AI reliably. Getting structured, predictable JSON outputs from Gemini for receipt parsing and quiz generation required careful prompt engineering and schema validation.

We also spent significant time designing the gamification system so that it felt meaningful rather than superficial. Connecting financial behavior to plant growth in a motivating way required multiple iterations of logic and UI design.

What We Learned

Through building Sprout, we learned:

how to integrate multimodal AI into real-world workflows
how to structure secure authentication systems with Supabase
how to work with live financial APIs
the importance of UX design in reducing financial anxiety

Most importantly, we learned that financial literacy tools can be educational and emotionally supportive at the same time.

What’s Next for Sprout

Tax & Debt Tools — student loan tracking, repayment guidance, and tax education.
Expanded Financial Features — deeper budgeting analytics, savings goals, and portfolio tracking.
Push Notifications — reminders for bills, savings goals, and financial habits.
AWS Deployment — scalable cloud infrastructure for growth and reliability.
AI Personalization — smarter spending insights and investment recommendations.
Community Features — mentorship and collaborative financial goals.

Our long-term vision is to make financial confidence feel accessible, empowering, and even fun for the next generation of students.