Student Runway

Inspiration

College students often struggle to understand their true financial position when looking at a static bank balance. Having $1,500 in an account provides false security without knowing whether it sustains living costs for two weeks or two months. We built Student Runway to eliminate budgeting ambiguity by converting account balances and active spending rates directly into runway days.

What It Does

• Dynamic Runway Countdown: Converts current bank balance and daily burn rate into an active countdown ring (currently tracking 24 days of survival).
• Live Financial Ingestion: Ingests live deposit and transaction events directly from Capital One's Nessie API—a $200 salary deposit extends the runway (+4 days), while grocery expenses dynamically shorten the survival window.
• Daily Burn Rate Gauge: Tracks average daily burn against safe spending thresholds to give clear, non-judgmental guidance.
• Weekly Activity Stream: Visually maps daily expenses against previous-week benchmarks.

How We Built It

• Frontend Architecture: Next.js (App Router), React, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui.
• API Integration: Capital One Nessie REST API (Account verification, Deposits, and Purchases endpoints).
• Deployment & Hosting: Deployed and hosted on Vercel with automated continuous builds.

Challenges We Ran Into

• Managing full-stack architecture, deployment pipelines, and UI prototyping completely solo within the hackathon timeframe.
• Securely handling API keys across server-side environment variables while maintaining reliable client-side sync.
• Creating defensive fallbacks so the dashboard maintains operational status without crashing during network or sandbox sync delays.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

• Delivered an end-to-end operational personal finance dashboard with functional Capital One sandbox integration.
• Designed a clean, high-contrast terminal UI that simplifies complex financial health into a single actionable metric: Days of Runway Left.

What we learned

• Behavioral FinTech UX: Learned that translating abstract numbers into time-based metrics (runway days) drastically reduces cognitive load compared to traditional multi-category budgeting charts.
• RESTful Banking Sandbox Modeling: Gained hands-on experience structuring dependent financial resources (Customers → Accounts → Deposits/Purchases) using the Capital One Nessie API.
• Resilient Full-Stack State Management: Mastered client-side fallback architectures and defensive state synchronization to ensure data availability across live sandbox environments and Vercel edge deployments.
• Solo Rapid Prototyping: Streamlined the end-to-end development cycle—from API integration to dark-mode component styling—under strict hackathon time constraints.

What's Next for Student Runway

• Multi-Account Aggregation: Ingesting multiple accounts (Checking + Credit) to calculate true net runway taking minimum dues into account.
• Ghost Subscription Detection: Automatically detecting and pruning recurring micro-subscriptions before they deduct runway days.
• Predictive Semester Modeling: Projecting financial stability up to final exams based on seasonal university expenditure spikes.

Built With

• capital-one-nessie-api
• next.js
• react
• rest-api
• tailwind-css
• typescript
• vercel