RedeemIt

"Scan it, save it, spend it."

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Inspiration

Most gift cards die in people’s wallets and junk drawers, leaving billions of dollars in free money unused every year. We created RedeemIt to solve this problem by giving users one centralized digital wallet and proactively reminding them to use them when purchasing items at sites they have gift cards for.

What it does

RedeemIt allows users to digitize and store all of their gift cards in one secure virtual wallet.

  1. Users take and uploads a clear picture of their gift card
  2. Our system extracts key information like card number, PIN, expiration date, and brand
  3. The card is stored in their wallet on the site and in the chrome extension
  4. When users get to a checkout page of any website, our system will prompt the user to use gift cards they have for the site, if they have any.

How we built it

The frontend was built using React.js and CSS to create a clean, intuitive interface that makes uploading and managing gift cards easy. The backend was built in Python with Supabase handling authentication and data management.

For image processing, we used Llama 3.2 Vision on Groq’s inference engine to extract data directly from gift card images. This allowed us to pull important information reliably and efficiently. We initially experimented with Tesseract-OCR, Google’s Optical Character Recognition tool, but it didn't perform well in real world conditions, so switching to Groq was critical for our project’s success.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was establishing our tech stack. We built part of our system around tools that later didn't work as expected. Switching OCR solutions later in the project was difficult and hard to navigate because it was such a core part of our project. We also had to change our database setup midway due to resource limitations, which led to us reworking core parts of our backend midway through the project. It forced us to adapt quickly and work fast under pressure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We built and deployed a fully functional web app and chrome extension in under 36 hours
  • Everyone on the team stepped into roles they were unfamiliar with and had very limited experience with and learned fast.
  • Despite multiple pivots, we built a working product that solves a real problem people face.

What we learned

We learned how important it is to validate your tech stack early. Building around tools that don’t end up working how you expect can set you back significantly. We also learned how important flexibility is. In any project, things will not work as expected but the ability to pivot quickly and find other solutions is invaluable.

What's next for RedeemIt

  • We want to support digital gift cards sent through email or text. Many get buried in inboxes and forgotten
  • We plan to let users add digital gift cards directly from Gmail using the chrome extension, making the process seamless and easy.
  • We plan to implement an additional form of uploading photos to the application—a qr code where users can scan and upload photos from their mobile phone.

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