Zoom In

GIF
logo

Inspiration

With AI getting so advanced, the internet has become a lot more dangerous especially for older people who can find it hard to adapt. Seniors are usually the main targets for online scams, and according to the U.S. Senate, the amount of money older adults lost to cybercrime quadrupled in just four years, jumping from $600 million in 2020 to a massive $2.4 billion in 2024.

What it does

Zoom In helps seniors and anyone who finds subscription websites confusing understand what a site may be trying to make them do before they enter payment details or attempt to cancel.

Add a subscription from a screenshot: upload or paste a screenshot of a subscription email, bill, or account page. Zoom In reads the visible details into a form for you to review before saving.
Keep a current subscription list: see your active subscriptions, renewal details, costs, and cancellation links in one place instead of searching through emails and websites.
Get a plain-English cancellation guide: choose Guide me for a step-by-step checklist that explains what to look for and what to click on your own device.
Get assisted AI cancellation help: for supported flows, Zoom In can open a cloud browser and help move through the cancellation process. It pauses for login walls, CAPTCHAs, two-factor authentication, and final confirmation so the user stays in control.
Scan a site: enter a public URL and receive an assessment based on page wording, checkout-related dark-pattern signals, using an AI model trained on a dark-pattern dataset.
Use Accessibility-Friendly Mode: switch to a clearer, easier-to-read presentation with more comfortable sizing and contrast. The mode is designed for seniors who may find dense interfaces, small text, or unclear instructions difficult to navigate.
Keep the user in control: the app does not claim that a real subscription was cancelled without an approved final action, and it does not ask the agent to solve CAPTCHAs or type two-factor authentication codes.

How we built it

Frontend and backend: the frontend website part is built with React, and it talks to a FastAPI backend that runs the actual logic. How a scan works: the user logs in, gives a URL or subscription info, and the app checks in periodically to show live progress while the scan or cancellation runs in the background. Steel provides a cloud browser, and Playwright controls it to walk through the site, by following cancellation steps and optionally checking accessibility, using pre-tested "recipes" rather than letting the AI freely decide what to click.

Spotting shady wording: the app looks at the page's text and structure using simple rule-based checks (BeautifulSoup) plus a small AI model trained to recognize deceptive phrasing, using data from an existing research dataset on dark patterns.

Challenges we ran into

Major platforms like Netflix and Spotify actively fight the kind of automation we're building using bot detection, CAPTCHAs, and 2FA. Instead of giving up altogether, we adapted our project and we built a "semi-assisted mode." Whenever the agent hits one of these barriers, it pauses, leaves the browser open on the exact page the user needs, and gives clear instructions on the single action they need to take. Once that's done, the agent takes back over.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of building something that caters to seniors that can help them, especially with how fast AI is growing.

What we learned

We learned that the hardest part of the project is respecting the limits of what an agent should be allowed to do on someone's behalf. A lot of our best design decisions came from asking where to stop, while considering privacy and ethics.