rocketcoin

Logo & motto

Inspiration

As students, we each have had our own struggles with our finances. We know that we are not alone in these struggles, so we wanted to create an application that can assist other students like us. The main issue that we've dealt with in our finances is budgeting, and that was what we wanted to focus on with our application. We were also inspired by SBUHacks itself when it came to the budget app's aesthetic.

What it does

Essentially, rocketcoin is a budget tracking application that lets the user set a budget, input items/transactions that the user does, and logs all transactions that the user makes while taking away from the budget that was inputted by the user. Seeing a visual representation of where the user's money goes and how fast it depletes allows the user to reflect on their financial decisions, keep them accountable, and log their transactions for reference.

How we built it

We used Flutter/Dart to create this application, Cockroach DB/MongoDB for the database, and we used Figma to create a prototype of our idea. We also used VSCode/Git/GitHub to collaborate.

Challenges we ran into

Since we were all new to Flutter, we had to start from zero in order to build the application. This brought many challenges with installation/set-up. Some of us were not able to get our emulators working, so we quickly fixed the issue by sticking to Chrome instead of Android/iOS. We also encountered merge conflicts due to packages being installed on some of our machines, but not all. We also had trouble with setting up the database with CockroachDB.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As new users to Flutter, we managed to learn a lot about it in the amount of time we had. Our prototype also closely aligned with the actual application, which is something we were worried about initially. Setting up the database was also a huge success.

What we learned

We learned how to utilize Flutter to create an application with a database, which is something each of us have not done before.

What's next for RocketCoin

Our future plans include adding a time option that allows the user to put the amount of time the budget is used for (EX: $500 for 1 month). Using this, we will be able to create a progress feature that displays the progress of the user throughout each of their budget plans (EX: If the user went over budget for 1 month, the whole month will be logged as "over budget." If the user did not, then there will be a success log.). Along with this, we will include a user login to save each of the budget logs. After this is implemented, we hope to create a way for users to get points for each budget plan that was successful (EX: Successfully under/at budget, allow the user to get 25 coins, use these coins to exchange for application items like new color themes, etc.). This would further the mission of helping people manage their budgets by creating incentives, and we hope to implement this.