Description as a Tweet:

Saving money has never been easier. You walk into an establishment and your phone tells you *automagically* if there is a hot deal going on.

Inspiration:

We thought that keeping track of coupons becomes cumbersome very quickly and thought that this would be an easy way to save some money without having to do any work yourself. It all happens seamlessly and you're notified if there are savings to be had.

What it does:

Our project uses the discount API to get a list of deals and discounts being offered at local establishments. We then cross reference geolocation data and radar.io place dataset to check if you have entered such an establishment. If there is an applicable coupon or deal that you can use at checkout, we send a notification on your mobile device.

How we built it:

We used discord to communicate and VSCode live sharing to collaborate on the code base. We also used git versioning and GitHub to synchronize workspaces.

Technologies we used:

Javascript
Node.js
Express
React
Misc

Challenges we ran into:

The biggest hurdle was that we weren't able to get location services to get authorized in Expo. So, even though we built out an interface and data pipelines, they were ultimately useless as there was no way for us to get geolocation and therefore use radar.io's suite of tools to make our idea happen as we envisioned it.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We committed to working on this project and prepared for this hackathon. We came in having an idea of what we wanted to do and we executed it to the best of our abilities given the time frame. We also learned a lot.

What we've learned:

We learned a lot about the different elements of mobile development (specifically background tasks and location services), api integration, and the importance of writing documentation.

What's next:

If we can resolve the location services issue, we could use the background task that we set up to update geolocation every set interval and then use radar.io to get places within some range of that location and parse the set of discounts and deals that we were able to pull from an API. We also thought of maybe adding a broadcast and listener mode where establishments could set up a beacon that listens to advertising devices via Bluetooth (other people using our app) and automatically adds coupons to their collection.

Built with:

React native mobile application and a node/express/MongoDB backend. We were also planning on using radar.io as mentioned before but were not able to due to the reasons included in the challenges section.

Coupon Companion