Dust | Devpost

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Inspiration

Finding a way to donate to a charity can be hard, but finding a charity you can trust is even harder. Many Americans argue that they “cannot determine a charity’s credibility” and feel “unorganized in their approach to charitable giving” (Fidelity Charitable, 2017). We realized that many people need a quick way to find a trustworthy charity and an easy way to donate. To tackle this issue, we thought, “What better way than to seamlessly integrate donations into your everyday life with a touch of AI?”

What it does

Dust is an app that helps you round up your recent purchases and donate the extra change to a wide range of charities! This way, you can make your everyday purchases while knowing you’re making a difference in the world with every transaction.

To find a charity, we use artificial intelligence and advanced search tools to help you discover the perfect match for your cause.

To get started, simply create an account, add a credit card that you use daily, and start making purchases. Dust does the rest! Our app pulls your recent credit card transactions from your bank and rounds each purchase up to the nearest dollar. After each transaction, we automatically accumulate that “extra change” and donate it to your selected charities.

How we built it

We built a mobile front-end interface using React Native, allowing us to run and test our app with Expo. Our Node.js/Express back-end connects to OpenAI, enabling us to summarize and research charities to help you find the right match for your cause. We also integrated the Stripe API to connect to credit cards, which allows us to retrieve transaction data and process donations directly on your credit card.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we encountered was setting up and managing banking transactions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we are proud of the outcome of this project because we learned mobile development for the first time and created something impactful!

What we learned

Integrating a bank API can be difficult as we need to provide proper and secure access to a user's account.

What's next for Dust

While developing our product, we realized that this app could be taken to the next level by providing a tax-deductible summary and news updates on the charities you've donated to, keeping you informed of the impact you've made!