StudentSaver

StudentSaver helps students build a grocery list, compare demo store prices, and get AI ingredient recommendations—so you can plan cheaper shops and stay on budget.

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Inspiration

One of our teammates have too little time to spend on building a weekly grocery plan. He couldn't find a simple, honest tool that just tell students where to shop. So we built one

What it does

A real-time budget tracker tells you how much you save versus shopping at the most expensive store. Six features: AI Dish Recommender, Grocery List Builder, Price Database, Cheapest Basket Engine, Smart Substitutions, and Savings Insights.

How we built it

StudentSaver is a Next.js 16 application deployed on Vercel, using Firebase for authentication and per-user grocery list persistence via Firestore.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Quantity Mismatch Bug. At first the AI returns ingredient quantities in real-world unit (e.g, 400g of pasta, 500g of beef).
  2. Limitation of Vercel usage for our application
  3. Doing 3 minute pitch video. Its hard for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We complete a MVP in a hackathon with all working auth, cloud sync, AI, price comparison, budget tracking. We implement a real algorithm that handles partial price data, missing items and multi-store comparison correctly.

What we learned

Ship the small thing well. Every dollar saved on groceries is a dollar that goes back into a student's life.

What's next for StudentSaver

We can do :

  • Mobile application so students can use it in-store as well, offline, on their phone
  • Bar code scanning using phone camera. More convenient way to search for a product

Built With

  • antigravity
  • cursor
  • firebase
  • next.js
  • openrouter
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