BackStash

An app that tracks spare change from transactions and gives user option to donate it to charity every month.

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Inspiration

While brainstorming ideas for the hackathon, someone brought up how he and his roommates always wasted spare change and that it probably added up to a decent amount every month. Using that idea, we tried to connect spare change or money that we spent on things we really don't need with charitable organizations.

What it does

BackStash is an app that tracks a user's monthly transactions and stashes their "spare change" in a database. At the end of every month, they are given the choice of donating their stash to charity or taking it back based on their financial situation.

How we built it

We built the frontend with HTML, CSS, JQuery, and Bootstrap. For the backend, we used python, sqlite, and flask. We also used Stripe API to deal with online transactions and Plaid API to connect to user bank accounts.

Challenges we ran into

Exhaustion was definitely a major challenge over the course of the 24 hour hackathon. Bootstrap was definitely a challenge for me, because I had never written such an extensive web application before. Additionally, hooking the front end with the back end was very stressful because of the time constraint.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of making the user interface presentable as well as learning all the new technologies needed to create this project. We are also proud of our extensive planning before any coding started. That was definitely what made our quick progress possible.

What we learned

We learned that learning technologies, languages, and frameworks ahead of time is crucial in saving time during hackathons. The time constraint is always a challenging factor in these events. Also, we realized the importance of coming up with a good idea. No amount of programming ingenuity can support a dull idea.

What's next for BackStash

We definitely want to keep this project going, because of its potential to affect the lives of many. The next steps will include finding new users, finding charities that are willing to participate, and debugging any errors.

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