Finosaur.ai

An AI-driven financial time machine that shows how tiny changes can make a big difference in the future!

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Finosaur.ai

Inspiration

We wanted to make personal finance feel less intimidating and a lot more fun, like a game or adventure. The idea of a “financial time machine” came naturally: what if you could see how your money habits evolve? And with our dino logo leading the way, Finosaur.ai was born: a playful way to visualize your financial future.

What It Does

Finosaur.ai allows you to enter your income, expenses, and savings, and you can "time-travel" to see two timelines: your current trajectory and what-if scenarios where you adjust spending or saving. It uses three AI “advisors" (Casey the Calculator, Sunny Saver, and Grump Gains) to forecast your financial future, and visualizes it through many different financial projection models, as a chart or calendar. Pixel-art avatars evolve as your financial health changes, while AI advisors explain your future in their own distinctive voices.

How We Built It

We built Finosaur.ai with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, styled in a retro gaming aesthetic.

  • Alex developed the UI/UX, designing the retro gaming aesthetic/animated dino sprite system and integrating the Gemini API for personalized AI forecasts.

  • Robert built the backend architecture, connecting Opik (for AI evaluation) and Capital One’s Nessie API (for mock banking data). He also implemented timeline analysis, with financial forecasting based on real market data from the S&P 500 and NASDAQ.

  • Keona handled full-stack features, including authentication infrastructure and token management, state sync between projections, and multi-agent outputs, ensuring Finosaur runs smoothly across all user interactions.

Challenges We Ran Into

Integrating multiple APIs, especially those with rate limits on Gemini, was challenging, and achieving consistent forecasts across models required significant iteration. We also spent time optimizing the UI for smooth rendering of charts and transitions, ensuring they are rendered without lag. Balancing the retro, playful aesthetic with clear financial visualization took experimentation and iteration, and we constantly refined layouts, color palettes, and component behaviors to make the experience both fun and intuitive.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

Our dinosaur logo, which gets stressed when your finances are bad. In addition, we're proud of our clean, interactive UI that makes financial forecasting fun, especially the timeline graph, which brings life to financial evolution.

What We Learned

We learned how to balance creativity with complexity, combining APIs, AI, and real calculations while keeping the experience approachable and fun. We also realized how important clear data visualization is when turning abstract financial data into something meaningful and motivating, and to make the web app less intimidating and intuitive to use.

What’s Next for Finosaur.ai

Finosaur.ai still has plenty of evolution ahead! We’d love to evolve our three-AI system into a full ecosystem of customizable “financial dinosaurs,” each with its own personality, forecasting style, and tone, and exploring our options of using other LLM models (like GPT or Claude). We want users to also be able to train their own advisors and watch how their Finosaur learns from real data over time. We’re also working on gamified milestones that make saving and budgeting genuinely rewarding (think achievements as your dino evolves from hatchling to apex investor.) Beyond that, we’re exploring social time-travel sharing, where users can compare alternate financial futures with friends, and live integrations with Echo and Plaid to bring real banking data into the mix. Finally, we’re building a Financial Evolution Report feature so users can look back on their journey to see how far they've come and detail how each part of their financial health impacts their future.

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