bill-e

Pricey grocery bills got you down? Sounds like you need bill-e! With an easy-to-use interface and blazing fast runtime, you’ll have the cheapest grocery bill in no time! Start using bill-e today!

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Inspiration

bill-e was inspired by our desire for affordable groceries. As university students, budgeting can be tough, and living within our means is a must.

What it does

bill-e is a grocery shopping assistant meant to minimize your grocery bill. It takes a grocery list as input, then checks the prices of the items at nearby stores and returns the cheapest options and total cost.

How we built it

We used Figma to create the front end, and Python to create the back end. Figma allows for collaboration directly which was very useful. In order to collaborate on the back end, we utilized GitHub to make changes to the Python scripts together.

Challenges we ran into

Originally we had planned on using Web Scraping in order to determine grocery prices from nearby stores’ websites. Unfortunately this was a much bigger task than we had originally thought. We followed tutorials and learned how to use the BeautifulSoup Python package to scrape the data we needed, however we ran into problems when most of the data from grocery store websites was unable to be scraped. Most of the websites had security features that required the use of a real browser to read the data, which was not possible to emulate with our web scraping script.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment was the progress made in such a short time. Even with all the time spent on trying to get the web scraping working, we managed to complete the rest of the Python script and developed an alternative to the web scraping. Our front end looks incredibly polished and makes bill-e look like a real product that is on the market right now.

What we learned

Even though it didn’t work out, we still learned a lot about Web Scraping tools with Python and even a bit about HTML in general. This was exciting as we hadn’t worked with HTML before this project.

What's next for bill-e

In the future we’d like to expand Bill-E to include more features to make the user’s experience even better. Filters based on range will be implemented and accounted for in order to create a more realistic bill. We’d also like to give the web scraping idea another go, with more time we could make it a reality.

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