Inspiration
I recognised how hard it is to know which subscriptions best suit your needs, especially with new services constantly appearing and the current economic pressure on people’s budgets.
I also saw how useful PayPal already is for managing subscriptions. With PayPal Honey in mind, I wanted to take that further with Val: one place that understands what you need, finds better value, helps you switch, and keeps your subscriptions connected to PayPal.
What it does
Val finds recurring payments through PayPal, asks about your usage in plain language, and remembers your answers when researching alternatives. You can choose how often it checks prices, down to one subscription at a time.
When you’re ready to switch, the agent shops for your chosen alternative and helps you through the purchase, keeping the new subscription on PayPal wherever the provider supports it. You stay in control of the final payment.
How I built it
I built Val with TypeScript, React, Node.js and PostgreSQL, using PayPal Sandbox, Gemini, KERNEL and Google Cloud. PayPal sits at the centre of the experience, from discovering recurring payments to paying for a replacement where supported.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge was carrying someone’s actual needs from a casual conversation through to research and shopping, while handling messy payment data and inconsistent provider information. I tackled this with decision memory, source checks and explicit purchase approval, so Val retains the user’s requirements throughout the flow and keeps them in control of the final payment.
Accomplishments I’m proud of
I’m proud of getting the payments, conversation, research and memory to work together after a lot of rethinking and debugging. Seeing Val pick up a new PayPal subscription, reopen the chat and retain the earlier preferences was particularly satisfying. That was the moment the work started to feel like a proper product.
What I learned
I learned to be more patient with the process and less attached to my first approach. A lot of the progress came from testing, getting things wrong and going back to understand why. I also realised how much my own habits shaped the product, which pushed me to test situations beyond the way I would personally use it.
What's next for Val - Your PayPal-powered subscription agent
Next is getting Val in front of people beyond myself and improving it from their feedback.
And winning this hackathon ;)
Built With
- css
- docker
- drizzle-orm
- express.js
- gemini
- google-cloud-run
- html5
- kernel
- node.js
- paypal
- postgresql
- react
- typescript
- vite
