SubSense

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Inspiration

Aside from being computer science majors, all four of us are pursuing minors in different business fields, including accounting and economics. We have learned that consumers pay for dozens of subscriptions totalling in the thousands every year. Many of which they are unaware, essentially bleeding money! We decided to utilize the Capital One Nessie API to combine our passion for finance with our computer science education to create a tool thousands of individuals would benefit from.

What it does

Our app, SubSense, uses the Capital One Nessie API to provide real-time data regarding users and spending habits. Our demo user shows an individual with one checking and one savings account. The app displays the subscriptions linked to the checking account and allows the user to cancel subscriptions, snooze reminders, or renew straight from the app. SubSense also offers a budgeting feature where users can set a monthly budget for subscriptions, and the app will flag the user if this budget is exceeded. In addition, users can customize their profile after logging in.

How we built it

We built our app using the React Native framework and used ExpoGo to display the application. For our UI/UX design we used HTML/CSS to neatly arrange our data and functionality.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge came from integrating the API. We had a multitude of errors, and it took hours of debugging for the server to actually connect and display the data. However, we worked through the code together and ensured our .env files were functioning, finally implementing the API data to display the demo data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the backend functionality of our program. As second years, we don't have much experience with integrating API's. However, we decided to use this hackathon as a learning experience and focused on the backend aspect of the application. For the first time, we dove into authentication by creating a login page, something we had no idea how to do prior to this hackathon. Overall, while it wasn't an easy feat to implement dozens of new features, we can confidently say we learned a lot about backend and implementation through this project.

What we learned

As stated above, the biggest learning curve for this project was general backend aspects such as API integration and authentication. These features were extremely sensitive and tended to fail with every little tweak. Through this, we learned the power and importance of communication. When it came to utilizing git, we accidentally gave each other aton of errors. However, while working together, we were able to use all of our strengths and combat the issues, coming out of his hackathon with a fully functioning application!

What's next for SubSense

With this being the most functional application we've ever created, we most certainly plan to continue adding functionality. We would like to possibly partner with a small branch or local bank, such as our university bank to roll-out the application to students. We would also like to actually add functionality to the canceling subscription function. Lastly, we would like to add a feature that syncs subscription reminders to apple/google calendars. Overall, SubSaver has a lot of potential and we hope to continue building in the near future!