Overview:
Budget Buddy is an iOS app designed to help students track expenses, manage meal-swipe budgets, and build better financial habits. The app bridges a common gap on campus — providing an easy way to visualize spending from school-provided funds in one place.
Inspiration:
This project also grew out of a growing frustration with the current app used by Swarthmore. They partnered with GET Mobile a while back to handle their digital key cards and virtual currency for students. While the GET app does display some of the same information(current running totals for meal swipes and campus cash) it had no way to help students budget their points over the semester.
That is where Budget Buddy came in! My cofounder Brooke Carrier approached me with the idea of creating a way for students to have an automatically calculated daily budget which would update each morning. This would allow students to start their day with an idea of what they could spend, helping with overspending. The daily balance updates in real time with transactions, even going into the negative when students overspend.
Outcomes:
- Technical Development: Built the app using a new to me framework React Native and integrated the existing Swarthmore Dining API for real-time budget tracking.
- User Engagement: 1.7K App Store Impressions in the first month with 124 downloads.
- Iterative Improvement: Quick beta and bug fix phase through feedback cycles with early adopters. This was used to guide features and future updates.
Tech Stack:
React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Node.js.
