bulletbill | Devpost

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Inspiration

As college students, we find ourselves constantly sharing meals and having to deal with the struggle of splitting our bills afterwards. Bulletbill is our fast solution to automating the bill splitting process.

What it does

Bulletbill is a web-app that allows you to upload an image of your restaurant or shopping receipt and use OCR and AI to recognize the text. The individual items are separated, and the user can assign which people purchased which items. Finally, the user can input their friends' phone numbers and their own Venmo to send a personalized text noting how much they are owed.

How we built it

The primary front-end technology used was EJS, and the primary back-end technology was Express.js. We also used Google Cloud and Cloud Storage for hosting, Twilio for SMS services, and TAGGUN for OCR.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the Hackathon, our beliefs about what we could and couldn't accomplish were constantly changed as our project evolved and grew. While initially skeptical about the plausibility of our success, we learned that not only were we capable of much more than we initially imagined, but we also were able to learn on-the-fly and bypass obstacles such as poor code collaboration, version control management, and organization as a team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

During the creation of our hack, we experienced so many 'wow' moments: times when we stepped back and just appreciated how far we had come from the beginning of the 24-hour period. Milestones like finally getting our project hosted on Google Cloud, receiving our first successful Twilio message, and even just deciding on the (almost) perfect font for our logo spurred us to keep going and present a finished product.

What we learned

We learned a ton about complex CSS, EJS, full-stack development, cloud hosting providers, and team camaraderie.

What's next for bulletbill

We would like to integrate our service directly with Venmo to remove the middle-man in the process, as well as creative native iOS and Android applications for a better user experience overall.