Sage

Spend your money wisely

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Inspiration

The "digital natives" generation is infamous for being emotionally dependent on their smartphones, overly obsessed with meme culture, and most importantly, inexperienced with handling their money. in fact, 78% of millennials rarely or never make spreadsheets to track personal finances, with 35% reporting they'd rather vomit than do so. Gross.

So, we set out to make personal finances less vomit-worthy and more effortless. Meet Sage, an iOS app and web app that helps you spend your money wisely.

What it does

Sage solves for two of the biggest headaches when it comes to personal finances - budgeting and spending. Our iOS app makes retail shopping an intuitive and streamlined experience. When they're shopping, users can utilize their phone's camera to automatically add products to their shopping cart. They'll also get a live pop-up notification if they are reaching their preset budget limits. Users can then purchase their items with the touch of a button -- ideally making long cash register lines obsolete! After their shopping experience, users can view their transaction history, set budget limits, and visualize their spending history and trends.

How we built it

The iOS app is built on Xcode and uses Apple's Core ML, machine learning framework for computer vision, to classify live images as retail products. The classified products are then added to the user's digital shopping cart. The Sage web app is built using Bootstrap and uses Google Charts to visualize spending trends.

Challenges we ran into

Even though only one of our team members had experience programming on Xcode, he was able to put together a functional iOS app in the 24-hour limit! Other challenges include attempting to integrate Nessie APIs and Citi's APIs into our solution, figuring out visualization tools in JavaScript, and working in HTML for the first time for two of our team members.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're excited to have come up with a product idea that could revolutionize the personal finance experience for individuals of all ages. Sage has a lot of future growth potential, and it was rewarding to build the basis for this growth. We're proud to have created a functional and elegant iOS app and web app, despite having limited or no experience working with these technologies.

What we learned

We learned that it's easy to dream up big plans for our hackathon project, but hard to pare it down to the minimum viable product. We also found it helpful to talk to various sponsor representatives, mentors, and peers about our project to gather feedback, seek advice, and iteratively improve our project. More technically, we learned how to use Core ML, build web apps, and create visualizations.

What's next for Sage

Sage's future is bright! With more time, we would've liked to build budget visualizations on the iOS app, use a database / server to more seamlessly link our mobile and web app, and expand the application of computer vision in our product. In the future, we see our app used to make retail shopping and payment entirely digital, enable automatic management of budgets, and pull information from paper receipts to split checks or track purchases made at retail stores not on our platform. Retail stores could also add product locations, nutrition information, and advertisement data to the platform.

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