Frugalicious!

Cooking up savings with every meal

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Inspiration

We know many people especially uni students are on a budget. We know sometimes we eat unhealthy fast food just to save money.

Thus, we come up with a website with the aim to help people to keep track of their food costs and make frugal homemade meals.

What it does

Frugalicious! Compile a list of ingredients and their estimated costs and nutrition on demand.

Frugalicious! Generate a list of possible cheap and healthy meals from the selected ingredients for you. We also provide recipe options for users with special diet requests.

Frugalicious! Provides a platform for like-minded people to share the latest food discounts and good recipes they found.

How we built it

For UI and UX, we designed our website using Figma.

For Front-end we used ReactJS (Vite).

For Backend, we wrote our code using Node with Express, we used MongoDB Atlas for our database.

For profanity checking, we use Perspective API using AI to check toxicity of posts. We host our website on Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

We are a group of ALL first-year students and some of our team members don’t have any experience in creating a website.

We need to get the price of ingredients from Woolworths, but we couldn’t get Woolworth’s APIs and had trouble using python beautiful soup to scrape their data.

What we learned

Diana: I started this hackathon knowing nothing about Figma, or any design theories. Throughout the process of creating UIUX for the website, we learnt how to make our design intentional and user-friendly.

Khang: I learnt that this comp is not for beginners

Jonathan: I learnt that I, a BCom student, would never consider a career in Comp Sci

Terry: I learnt SVG for the wavy background

Cindy: I knew nothing about web development, I learnt basic Figma, HTML, CSS, javascript and React one week before the hackathon.

What's next for Frugalicious!

Make a mobile app! Users can calculate recipe costs anytime anywhere.

Get APIs for major supermarkets and update data regularly.

Add a comment session to the post area.

Implement an AI chat box to answer users’ questions and generate responses according to users’ diet habits/requests.

References

APIs: Spoonacular API (Search recipe): link

FoodDataCentral API (Nutrients recipe): link

Perspective API (Checking post toxicity): link

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