Steady

Inspiration

Gig workers - particularly Uber drivers - face unstable weekly earnings shaped by weather, events, demand spikes, and irregular hours. This volatility makes budgeting stressful and planning difficult. In the spirit of the competition theme, we wanted to go further by building something that works on both the micro level (helping individual drivers gain stability) and the macro level (revealing broader economic patterns that can inform policy and improve market efficiency). Steady was our way of connecting personal financial empowerment with system-wide insights.

What it does

Steady forecasts weekly income, measures earnings stability, and provides personalised recommendations on the best times and conditions to work. It helps drivers set weekly goals, understand what drives volatility, and plan their hours more effectively. On a macro level, aggregated insights can reveal broader gig-economy income patterns, supporting fairer policy design and improving labour-market efficiency.

How we built it

For the MVP, we generated realistic, Uber-style trip data (42-day windows across multiple drivers) and combined it with real contextual inputs like weather and public holidays. We then built forecasting, volatility, and recommendation engines on top of this dataset to power the dashboard.

Because we couldn’t access Uber’s real driver data within the hackathon timeframe, this version uses simulated trip data - but the entire pipeline is designed to plug directly into real-world data sources (such as the Uber Driver API) with minimal changes once access becomes available.

Challenges we ran into

Creating data that behaves like real gig-economy earnings

Modelling volatility reliably with limited time

Ensuring the frontend experience stayed intuitive despite complex underlying logic

Keeping deployment simple while working with simulated and real contextual inputs

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A clean, explainable forecasting engine

A stability index that makes income volatility understandable

A fully functioning dashboard built from scratch in a short timeframe

A product that meaningfully benefits workers while enabling large-scale economic insights

What's next for Steady

We plan to integrate real Uber Driver API data (as well as other plaforms), add deeper behavioural analytics, and explore income-smoothing features. At scale, Steady could provide anonymised insights to help shape fairer gig-economy policies and improve overall market efficiency.