Valueator

Quick Summary

Valueator is a financial budgeting web application that focuses on the monthly subscription base services, and seeing whether or not it is really worth keeping. This app was submitted for the Hack the Northeast Hackathon where contestants had 36 hours to submit their application that meets the requirements.

GitHub Repository
View the Project on Devpost

Video Demo (Click link or image below to view)

Inspiration

Every year there are new digital subscription services releasing providing various new things. Paying for these services such as Hulu, Netflix, Disney+ and more can add up in a hurry and who has the time to actually use all those services each month! We as a team wanted to create our own finance tracker that focused on the monthly subscription base services, and seeing whether or not it is really worth it for us to keep.

What it does

After putting in your monthly income, and adding your expenses for a month, you will be shown a chart that breaks down the different categories of how you spend your money. Our application will also show how much you are paying hourly for the online subscription based services.

How we built it

Valueator was built using the django framework, bootstrap 4, and along with some javascript and jquery.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was trying to come up with an idea that would separate our product from the rest. This is how we came to the conclusion of focusing on the subscription based services. While we were working on the project, we didn’t have a full 36 hours available, as some of us were busy during certain times. We ended up only spending about half of the given time on the project. Thus, we struggled with completing everything we planned to do. We left out certain components, such as an update button and styling a better UI/UX for users.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Django is a somewhat new experience for our team and we feel that we made a pretty decent application in the 36 hours we had to work on it.

What we learned

Our group learned how to product manage by assigning tasks to one another so that we wouldn’t conflict with what the other person is working on at the time and kept strong communication throughout development.

What’s next for Valueator

There are a lot of improvements that can be made to Valueator such as suggesting alternatives to certain expenses or possibly having the ability to compare your expenses to others in the same income bracket. A possible feature is where users can link their screen time data from their phones can be used to calculate an accurate hourly cost for digital subscriptions if an phone app version of this were to be created. The room for improvement is endless.

Screenshots

Landing Page

Budgeting App Page (Monthly Income Stats)

List of User’s Expenses

Graph of User’s Expenses and Savings