UniCards

Inspiration

As financially-challenged college students, we have continually sought out the most advantageous methods for making purchases and evaluating which of our credit cards offer the most advantageous benefits. This led us to the development of UniCards.

What it does

UniCards allows the user to combine their cards into a single virtual card that makes transactions using the best credit card benefits. Unicards is also a great alternative to sharing your card details with websites you do not trust. Simply delete your virtual cards and forget about the subscription trial. Unicards also lets you set granular limits over each of your physical cards to make sure you don't go over any limits or worry about any surprise purchases. Unicards also lets you split your purchases among all your cards which can be much smoother than making a big dent in your wallet.

How we built it

The backend was built with flask, sqlalchemy and cockroachdb and hosted on heroku the frontend was built using a custom javascript framework maintained by one of our very own team members and a css compiler library written by him too. The frontend also makes use of stripe's payment libraries for smooth validation flow

Challenges we ran into

Generating virtual cards through a provider proved to be incredibly difficult as almost every provider needed us to be on an enterprise plan. We decided to focus on our algorithm for choosing the best card and for this MVP, we use our own network of transactions and card generations. (i.e cards generated by uni cards will not work outside of our network :) ) The demo store website is part of our unicards network, have fun trying our service out!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Excellent auth flow with json web tokens and automatically refreshing them on token expiration Auto updating your transactions, no need for refreshes fluent animations, errors and retries super easy to use rest-api for future development lovely store demo forked for demonstration purposes