CostCompass | Devpost

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Inspiration

Moving to a new place is a major life decision that involves balancing personal dreams with practical considerations. As a team, we’ve all felt the stress of trying to figure out whether a place truly fits our needs—not just financially, but in terms of quality of life. We wanted to create a tool that eases this anxiety, giving people clarity and confidence in their choices. CostCompass was born from our desire to help others navigate the often confusing landscape of living expenses, empowering users with information to make more thoughtful and informed decisions about their future.

What it does

CostCompass provides a Geographic Information System (GIS)-powered map, offering real-time insights on the cost of living across the United States, helping users make informed decisions about living expenses based on budget and lifestyle preferences. Whether you're exploring local costs or regional trends, CostCompass provides precise data, highlighting differences in cost of living across various counties in the US.

How we built it

We integrated data from the Google Maps API and the U.S. Census API to retrieve up-to-date information regarding cost of living as well as other indicators for every county in the U.S. We also used OpenAI's API for Chat-GPT to provide nuanced responses that include both positive and negative characteristics of the area, helping users come to informed decisions about whether they want to move to a particular area.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges when we were setting up the design of our website and ensuring that all functionality worked together seamlessly to create a final product. We also ran into challenges with finding appropriate data to query, as the US Census dataset that we were using did not have some of the data that we wanted, and had lots of data that we did not need to use.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first completed hackathon project that our team has created, so we are proud that we were able to see it through to the end!

What we learned

We learned a lot about how to use external APIs for data retrieval as well as interactive functionality. We also learned about how to create a complete website with both frontend and backend functionalities.

What's next for CostCompass

We would like to include more county data on our website such as crime rates, hospital availability, property tax, and resident satisfaction so that our users may become even more informed about these important aspects of the place that they choose to live. We would also like to include information about how these statistics have changed over time and predicted trends for them.