trackzu

Inspiration

With increasing use and development of digital technology, more people are subscribing to online entertainment services (i.e. Netflix, YouTube, etc.). It is easy to overlook the need to keep track of monthly subscriptions. Especially you do not have to consciously make a payment since automatic billing is doing the task for you. However, this could raise a problem as money could be deducted unnecessarily from your credit account if there are changes made to those services. Thus, it is important to keep track of your subscriptions and stay organized.

What it does

trackzu is focused on helping you manage all your subscriptions in one place by keeping track of your app and services subscriptions in the background and providing reminders for ones that are close to the next payment. In subscription tracker, users can:

Remove or add in new subscriptions freely
Customize the tag of different subscriptions so that it is easier to distinguish different subscriptions
Calculate the overall payment on a monthly basis

How we built it

MockUps and Design: Figma
Front-End: React
Back-End: Firebase

Challenges we ran into

It’s our first time participating in web development, we didn’t have professional programming skills. However, we learned and fought and eventually delivered some form of the app
Hosting: we didn't and still are rather unsure of how to properly host and deploy the app
Firebase: none of us have touched Firebase in our lives but decided to try and use it for the project; however, learning
The time limit was also a challenge, meaning we had to prioritise components which are closer to the core of our ideas
Due to the ongoing pandemic, everything was done online and not all team members were in the same time zone, meaning it was not the most efficient way of doing a team project

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the efforts spent in this project and most importantly, the final app we delivered under all challenges and constraints. Moreover, we are proud of our teamwork and cooperation and we have also learnt the importance of listening to others’ opinions as it allows us to be open-minded, patient. Collective efforts are definitely more rewarding than working alone. Finally, we also learnt how to prioritise what is the most important and how to continue working through adversities and challenges.

What we learned

There was much we did not know about web development, especially in the back-end. Often we had to rely on help from mentors to guide our way through our project. We’ve learnt about the uses of databases and tried our best to understand and apply it in our project. Being asked to work in groups forced us to reconnect with friends and make new relationships while also teaching us how to better cooperate as a team.