DOFO - Family Shopping List

Realtime Family sharing Shopping list app with Shop Location alerts and with spend tracking dashboard by scanning the receipts.

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Project Story

Inspiration

The idea or inspiration is already in the DOFO app’s tagline “Don’t Forget”. This app is what I want personally to add my shopping list and be able to share with my family to manage our household in a very optimized and easy way.

I have been thinking about this idea for a long time. At that time, I heard about this hackathon. Then I just said to myself, this is the time to build this mobile app. So that is how it started.

What it does

The DOFO helps us to manage the shopping for groceries, events, festivals, college studies, schools, and more.

The features of DOFO are: 1) Realtime Family Sharing Shopping lists 2) Location-based Alerts 3) Scan the receipt and record/track the spending 4) Multilingual Voice input supports global languages and all languages supported by the user’s device.

Here is a sample workflow (Story-based): Meet Eswar, a young man traveling by car from his office to his home. His mom added a grocery shopping list in the afternoon with the store mentioned, as she is a regular customer of that store. Eswar is on his way near his home when he gets a call from his mobile. He stops on the roadside to check who it was, but it’s actually a DOFO alert with a notification that redirects Eswar to the shop mentioned by his mom in Google Maps. He reaches the shop, buys the items, and scans the receipt to update the spending dashboard. Eswar comes home with the grocery items, and his mom is happy and serves him food.

How I built it

I researched Bolt’s capabilities and the programming languages it supports. I ended up using React Native with Expo for the mobile application since I wanted a cross-platform mobile app.

First, I designed the UI in Figma to visualize the app interface. Then I started with “Bolt.new” to build the app from scratch. I tried importing the Figma design directly using Bolt.new’s Figma integration feature, but that didn’t work well for me. So, I started prompting from scratch, giving instructions and adding images to get the app as needed. After a long thread, I got a 50% functional application. Then I shifted to VS Code and later to Cursor. After moving the project to Cursor, I finished the app to its current level. It still needs optimization.

This is how I was able to pull off this app in 20 days from scratch to production.

Challenges I ran into

The first challenge was that I had only 13M tokens from the Bolt.new $30 promo code. I thought I could pull it off with those tokens, but I ran into an RLS issue after Supabase integration. That issue consumed several tokens. The problem wasn’t with my RLS policies but with Supabase itself, which I discovered after researching on forums and the internet.

Other than this, I didn’t face major challenges. Building with AI takes longer to articulate your vision and make the model build according to it. You have to be very clear about UI/UX and functionalities.

Accomplishments that I’m proud of

Pulling this project to production in just 20 days is a first for me. I also submitted the app to the Play Store. Not much to be proud of yet—there’s a long way to go.

What I learned

I learned so much while building this project. It was an experiment to see, “Can AI code an actually useful tool the way I want?” In the future, development time will be 50x faster, but deployment takes a lot of time.

Articulate your thoughts… Articulate your words… Articulate your mind… This is what I keep learning when using AI daily.

What's next for DOFO - Family Shopping List

DOFO is just a baby for now. I plan to make it a customized, personalized ordering app. Since we already have a list, I’ll add a payment gateway and store accounts for store owners. Users can place orders directly once their shopping list is ready after discussing with family, pay online, and receive/pick up the order from their preferred store, where they’ve shopped for years.

This will make buying boring household items easier and automated, freeing up time for more creative pursuits.

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