Streetwise

Development of our project

Inspiration

This summer, we took our first trip without our parents: a girls’ trip to Greece. We were thrilled, and completely unprepared financially. With no idea how to budget, we built a spreadsheet of predicted costs and tried to track our savings in our heads. Without a concrete plan, we kept dipping into our savings whenever a restaurant or souvenir shop caught our eye. Even a spontaneous museum visit meant checking our bank balances on patchy signals, which made the holiday more stressful than it needed to be. When we read the brief, “make it easy to do more, in more places, with less effort,” that spreadsheet was the first thing we thought of. Wise’s travel hub already offers live exchange rates and holiday advice, but nothing helps travellers get to the trip financially. Banking apps have introduced “pots” for general saving, so we asked: what if Wise had a pot that knew what your holiday would actually cost, so you can enjoy the trip without worrying about it?

What it does

Streetwise turns “I want to go on holiday” into a savings plan you can actually follow. Start your plan. Choose to create your own budget or get a Wise-recommended budget based on your trip, e.g. 4 days in Lisbon for 2 people, filtered by price range. Build it out. Add the expenses you already know about: flights, accommodation, activities. Save automatically. Streetwise generates a weekly savings commitment and sends it to a Wise Jar, so the money is set aside before you travel.

How we built it

We built Streetwise as a web app using HTML, styled to match Wise’s design language to blend seamlessly. We “vibe coded” with Claude: we described features in plain English and iterated on what it generated. Our work: the problem research, the user flow and wireframes, all feature decisions, testing, and the Wise-style design direction. AI-assisted: code generation and refinement of each prototype. Every iteration of the app is in our GitHub, with notes explaining why each feature changed.

Challenges we ran into

We spent longer than planned on ideation, so we had to choose: code it ourselves and ship something unfinished, or vibe code and ship something that matched our vision. We chose the latter, then learned to write sharper prompts to get the results we wanted. Our bigger challenge was scope. We wanted an “on trip” feature that lets you log spending and adjusts your remaining daily budget. After feedback from the Wise sponsors, we realised the plan was trying to do too much, so we cut it back to do one thing well. We felt that having too many features on an extension can be overwhelming and offputting for users, so focused on simplicity and functionality. We made cutbacks and focused on one main issue, budgeting in advance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We found a real gap in Wise’s travel hub, based on our own holiday experiences and matched Wise’s look so feel so Streetwise feels native. Through acting on sponsor feedback by simplifying the app we changed “travel style” to “price range” to remove confusion and decreased the number of functions to ensure easy navigation and a seamless flow. We went from zero to prototype and learnt to prompt effectively and iterate quickly whilst combining our three different skill sets into one cohesive project. We managed to use GitHub effortlessly and run into no issues whilst using it.

What we learned

Two of us come from life science backgrounds with little coding experience, so this weekend was a steep climb. Under Manya’s guidance (she studies computer science), we learned how to use GitHub, including pull requests and publishing to a repository, and how to write and refine prompts to steer Claude toward what we wanted. The biggest lesson: good prompting is really good product thinking. The clearer we were about the user’s problem, the better the output.

What's next for Streetwise

Our next steps are live adjustment by introducing an “on trip” mode. This allows users to log spending during the trip and watch your daily budget update automatically. We would also like to introduce a deeper Wise Jar integration by connecting savings plans directly to jars so contributions are automatic as well as smarter recommendations to include more destinations, trip lengths, price ranges and currencies. We deliberately saved the live feature for later. Our sponsor feedback was to pick one thing and do it well, so we focused on the planner.