SmartSave

Inspiration

College students juggle tight budgets, social lives, and campus expenses without great tools designed specifically for them. We wanted to make it fun and rewarding to build healthy money habits on campus, not just track numbers in a boring banking app. SmartSave Campus was born from asking: what if budgeting felt like a game, with a coach in your pocket and your friends on a leaderboard?

What it does

SmartSave Campus is a mobile app that helps students spend smarter on campus:

Track spending vs budget: See weekly and monthly spending against simple goals.
Savings leaderboard: Compete with friends and classmates on a "top savers" board and track your rank.
AI helper before buying: Chat with an AI spending coach that suggests cheaper alternatives, sanity-checks purchases, and highlights tradeoffs.
Mock campus payments: “Pay” for campus items (coffee, snacks, transport, events, etc.) through a mock Stripe-style flow so we can demo the experience without real money.
Visual insights: Simple charts and summaries so students quickly see where their money goes.

Main app tabs:

Home – balances, this week’s spend, quick actions.
Tips – history, categories, and a simple chart of spending trends.
Leaderboard – top savers, your rank, and badges/achievements.
Events – campus events.
AI Helper – a chat interface with the spending coach.

How we built it

Frontend (mobile): Built with React Native and Expo, using TypeScript and a tab-based navigation layout for the core screens (Home, Explore/Spending, Leaderboard, AI, etc.).
UI/UX: Custom components for cards, lists, and charts designed to feel like a modern banking app but simplified for students (balances, budgets, quick actions).
Backend: A Python FastAPI service that powers API endpoints for transactions, student profiles, events, leaderboard data, and AI interactions.
AI: The AI tab calls backend endpoints that wrap LLM - Gemini logic to give contextual spending advice and explanations tailored to a student’s recent activity.
Data layer: Simple models for users, transactions, budgets, and leaderboard stats; mocked and/or seeded data to make the demo feel realistic.
Tooling: Expo dev tools for the app, and standard Python tooling (virtualenv, requirements.txt) for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Designing the right incentives: Balancing fun, competition, and real financial responsibility without turning money into a stressful scoreboard.
Data modeling: Making a simple but flexible model that can handle budgets, categories, events, and leaderboard logic without over-engineering for a hackathon.
AI coaching UX: Figuring out how and when students would actually use an AI helper before purchases, and how to keep the chat short, actionable, and non-judgmental.
Time and integration: Connecting the mobile UI to the backend APIs, handling async calls, and keeping the demo stable within hackathon time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

End-to-end experience: We built a full flow from a student opening the app, seeing their balances, chatting with an AI coach, and “paying” for campus items.
Polished UI: The app feels like something a student could actually download and use, with intentional navigation, cards, and clear summaries.
Meaningful AI use: Instead of using AI just for chat, we focused on behavioral nudges—helping students reason about tradeoffs, savings, and goals.
Gamified savings: The leaderboard and badges make saving feel like a group challenge, not a lonely spreadsheet.

What we learned

Students need context, not just numbers: Raw transaction data isn’t enough—students want clear “what this means for me” insights.
AI works best with structure: The AI responses are most helpful when we frame the conversation around goals, budgets, and concrete purchase decisions.
Good UX beats complexity: Simple, well-designed views for spending and budgets matter more than advanced financial features in a hackathon setting.
Team workflow: We improved at splitting frontend, backend, and AI work while keeping API contracts and design consistent.

What's next for SmartSave

Richer budgeting: Add recurring bills, savings goals, and alerts when you’re close to overspending in a category.
Deeper campus integrations: Pull in real campus data like dining dollars, print quotas, and event tickets (with university APIs where possible).
Smarter AI coaching: Personalize recommendations based on long-term patterns, academic calendar (midterms, breaks), and student goals (saving for trips, textbooks, etc.).
Social features: Allow small groups (clubs, roommates, friends) to set shared savings challenges and celebrate milestones together.
Real payments: Explore a path from mock payments to sandboxed or partner-powered real transactions in a safe, regulated way.