SubTrack

Introduction
Problem
Solution
Technology

Inspiration

Our team first came up with this idea because we all struggled with managing our subscriptions to services like Spotify, Netflix, and Leetcode. And it turns out, we’re not the only ones. According to a 2021 Subscription Fatigue Report, the average US household is subscribed to nine different services, making it difficult to keep track of all their subscriptions. With the subscription service industry being so saturated and monopolized by large corporations, it can also be hard to find cheaper or sustainable subscriptions as alternates. This makes it difficult for smaller subscription-based businesses to compete against larger companies like Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon Prime.

What It Does

SubTrack is the one-stop mobile app for managing all your subscriptions. We make it easy to subscribe, unsubscribe, and notify new charges/price changes. SubTrack also serves as a subscription marketplace.

How We Built It

We built our mobile app using Swift, our backend database using PostgreSQL, and served queries using FlaskAPIs. To improve our scalability, we used Azure Kubernetes Service in conjunction with Azure Autoscale to dynamically scale our backend computing power in response to changes in requests.

Challenges We Ran Into

Challenges that we faced involved converting our designs into the actual mobile app. Our team’s collective iOS development experience is limited, so it took us a while to get used to SwiftUI syntax. After finishing our first "screen" in Swift, we got the hang of the syntax and were able to "hack" our way through with a ton of Googling.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

"We demoed!"

We are proud of overcoming all the challenges that we faced as a team. Despite being limited by the amount of time we had to develop, we completed our project by distributing our workload and leveraging the various skills among the members of our team.

What We Learned

A lot of SwiftUI and how to merge frontend designs with backend systems using different technologies such as Azure, Swift, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes.

What's Next For SubTrack

Our next goal is to bring SubTrack to the real world by publishing it on the App Store. We want to make SubTrack into a B2B startup that can positively impact the subscription market. While SubTrack can help consumers manage their subscriptions, it can also empower small businesses by providing adequate market exposure. With enough users and data, SubTrack will be able to create multidimensional data models that personalize subscription recommendations for customers and predict customer churn rates for businesses. We can offer small businesses consulting services to help them analyze their customers and increase their user retention rates.