The Doggy Financier

A gamified budgeting app where saving money takes care of your dog. Stay under your weekly limit and Biscuit thrives. Every unspent dollar becomes gems for hats, fur colors, rooms, and mystery crates. Overspend or neglect him and he gets sad. Biscuit also lives on your Android home screen as an animated widget that tracks your spending in real time.

Inspiration

As college students, we struggled to stay connected to our own finances. Most budgeting apps feel like spreadsheets with a login: they show you a chart of what you already overspent and give you no reason to come back. We built the app we wished existed, one that makes managing money easier, more engaging, and something you actually want to open.

What It Does

Links your accounts. Connect checking, savings, and credit cards once. Your data pre-fills your profile and budget so there are no long forms.
Categorizes everything with AI. Gemini labels each transaction (food, housing, entertainment, health, transportation, income, transfer, or other).
Sets a realistic weekly limit for you. It detects recurring bills, then proposes savings in categories that are genuinely expendable. You review and accept each proposal.
Rewards good habits. Unspent dollars and transfers into savings earn gems. Gems buy customizations and pay for Buscuit's food and water.
Keeps Biscuit's mood tied to your budget. Happy under budget, sad when over, and missing if neglected.
Puts your dog on your home screen with a widget.

What We Learned

Android development from scratch: Kotlin, Compose, Room, and home screen widgets with Glance.
The .NET ecosystem: building a minimal API, EF Core migrations, and token-based auth with ASP.NET Core Identity.
Cloud hosting: standing up and sharing a PostgreSQL database on AWS, none of which we had done before.
Personal finance: how budgets, recurring bills, and everyday spending habits actually work.

Challenges

An unfamiliar stack. Almost none of our tech stack was familiar to the entire team, so the initial setup (tooling, project configuration, and connecting the app, backend, and database) took a lot of time.
Working with bank data. We used a sandbox data service, which was not intuitive.