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ScriptO - all your plans, all at once!
Inspiration:
According to a recent study, it was found that the average American spends $129 monthly on subscription channels alone, including those which are no longer in use or have limited usage, as well as those which have pending overdue charges. Do you know how much you spend on subscriptions? What is shocking is that when respondents were asked how much they think they spend, the average answer was $86. That's a big difference. In such a situation, the need for a Subscription Management platforms like ScriptO - with features to enable notifications for payments due and track your subscriptions – becomes ever so vital.
However, at the same time, it's true that there are already a lot of Subscription Management Platforms out there in the market already. What will make Scripto different from them is that we are not only concerned for the financial well-being of the users but we also keep in mind the Subscription Services to make sure that, once the users are once again financially well and stable to go back to subscribe to the Services, as it's most often the case that when someone unsubscribes from a Subscription, it's likely they won't subscribe again unless they have an specific reason to. Let's put an example, when it comes to a Streaming Service, the users would most likely go back to subscribing to the service again if they see a movie or a tv show that interests them, as this would incite them to go back to being active subscribers of the Streaming Platform. Here at Scripto, one of our biggest goals is to remind the user about future content that the Subscription Services will have with notifications that the app would send the user, content that could potentially interest them to go back to being subscribers, which is more than likely to be the case once their financial situation has improved, as the app will send content that is either popular at the moment or content that can interest the user in specific based on what they've consumed before on the Services that they were subscribed to before.
What is ScriptO?
First-time hackers and motivated Computer Science students from The University of British Columbia have created ScriptO - a highly interactive, customer-centric subscription management system focused on catering to the management needs of your subscription plans – all on a single platform. The aim of Scripto is simple: build a platform to manage all your subscription plans, all at once. Spanning popular names from Netflix in the entertainment sector to Amazon for your latest shopping spree and Fido to converse with your loved ones, ScriptO makes administering your records transparent yet efficient and powerful by eliminating unwanted complexities on a user-friendly interface.
Now find it easier to prevent overdue charges, organize subscription budgets and manage renewals/cancellations of all your plans, all at once. Track the periodic bills incurred, and payments due and enable notifications to get suggestions on where to save up! If you’re managing more than 3 models, we have you covered. Feel free to compare the usage and finances incurred for each subscription on our platform.
What sets us apart?
Website structure: Our website has an appealing and genuinely interactive user interface which is easy to use for all age groups, making it highly accessible to the public. We have removed all unwanted complexities and made the process a smooth and quick one for the customer.
Customer-centric: We strictly ensure to receive regular feedback along with the constant implementation of concurrent improvements based on customer suggestions.
Convenience factor: You will be able to effortlessly manage all your subscription models on a single platform (with a wide range), a feature not available easily in the open market. Moreover, our website comes with the option of comparing prices, enabling you to choose between similar-use case subscription channels.
What makes us marketable?
Scope: Our project delves into a relatively unexplored sector. This puts us at a high chance to succeed in this sector since our competition is limited, and the existing ones are likely never going to be close to our managerial system in most ways. There is a lack of sufficient platforms in this domain. We are solving an extremely common but remarkably overlooked obstacle by following a highly efficient procedure and structure, as demonstrated by our website. Although our solution is straightforward, it maintains ample innovative and creative aspects.
Our selling points are clear: Exceedingly accessible, highly efficient (saving valuable time spent on site), noticeable cost reduction and multi-platform management
How we built it:
First, we built a prototype of ScriptO using Figma before assembling the main code. We manually implemented codes for each section of the website design and its concurrent features. GitHub served as a host for all our codes and helped in coordinating our work with each other. We used HTML, CSS and Bootsrap for the design and JavaScript for the functionality of the web application. We used Visual Studio Code as the IDE for the above tasks.
Challenges we ran into:
The major challenge for any hackathon project is usually the time constraint, and ours was not foreign to that. Owing to the time crunch, we did have to make some difficult choices on what to and what not to include on the site. Given the nature of our project, it was easy to get diverted and try overachieving. We ended by devoting our attention to making our system as managerial-based, customer-centric and accessible as possible while avoiding luring but avoidable features as of now. These, however, would be strong candidates for future additions and are enlisted in the next section.
The second important obstacle we faced was the integration of all our works from different platforms. Combining various frameworks into a single platform with accurate layouts, colour schemes and structures was certainly a time-consuming task.
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
To begin with, our team appreciates the immense commitment and character displayed by each member over the past 48 hours. We can proudly say that we worked on creating a solution to an overlooked financial problem which not many have given attention to. Rather than trying to go overboard, we have understood the strengths and limitations of each of our members very well, gelling together to bring up this wonderful demonstration. In other words, our team has identified a common issue and come up with an original method to address it. We also pride ourselves on our usage of relatively new and complex JavaScript functions within a tight time crunch.
What we learned?
Over the past couple of days, our team has gained insightful soft and technical skills which were not only used for the betterment of this project but shall be embedded in our experiences for the future. To begin with, our team learnt to coordinate and communicate well - despite not knowing each other beforehand - by combing the diversified expertise of each member to put together the final product. These include, but are not limited to our usage and extension of knowledge of frameworks for Web Development and the domains related to it.
What's next?
Automated payments: At the time of submission, we have limited the website to a purely managerial structure. In future, the system can be expanded to enable automatic payments through user-entered e-banking details.
Time reduction & cost cutting: Although our focus is on making the subscription management as customizable as possible, certain users may prefer to have automated cancellations and renewals especially if they have a large number of plans. This reduces interactivity but also saves customers the the manual time they would have to otherwise spend.
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