Savvy Savers

Keep yourself accountable for your finances

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The Problem

Have you ever spent some time on Amazon and end up buying novelty products that you don't really need after rationalizing to yourself, "I haven't bought anything online since last month"? Or maybe "I haven't spent that much money online"? But suddenly you check your bank account and it's MUCH lower than you thought it would be. Keep yourself accountable when spending online with Savvy Savers.

What it does

We've developed a chrome extension that keeps track of your purchases for the month by scraping order confirmation pages and listing out where you spent your money online. The goal of the extension is to isolate online spending so consumers can consciously spend their money online.

How we built it

We used Javascript, HTML, and CSS to develop a simple extension that lists a person's purchases and saves their history using Chrome's storage API, so even when the browser is restarted, your past purchases are still there to haunt you.

Challenges we ran into

It was our first time creating a chrome extension, and the languages used were new to many of our group members. We encountered many issues when debugging because we did not realize that the console output was different for the tab and the extension. Also, we struggled to comprehend the flow of data between all the Javascript, CSS, and HTML files.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The main functionality works! A lot of the extra additions such as allowing a user to set a monthly limit, alerts when checking out, and scraping the page for totals automatically are things we can work on for future iterations. Also, we all wanted to create a hack that is convenient and useful, and we think we accomplished that goal.

What's next for Savvy Savers

A lot of additional features can be added to the extension to make it even more useful as an online budgeting tool. Adding a monthly limit, possibly connecting to a bank, automatically identifying a purchase, and many more iterations can be added to the base functionality.

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