MoneyMaxxing

🎖️ Honorable Mentions at HackPrinceton Spring 2025 (Finance Track). MoneyMaxxing is a Gen Z-first budgeting app that transforms how young users interact with their money. It combines clean design, intelligent automation, and AI-powered insights to make managing personal finance easy, intuitive, and even fun.

For a lot of Gen Z, money apps feel like they were built for someone else: dense spreadsheets, guilt-trip dashboards, and charts that make a $6 coffee feel like a moral failing. MoneyMaxxing flips that. It is a Gen Z-first, AI-powered budgeting app designed to make managing money feel intuitive, personal, and honestly kind of fun, with room to still enjoy your life instead of cutting everything out. Built at HackPrinceton Spring 2025, it earned an Honorable Mention in the Finance Track. The whole idea is to meet young people where they actually are, impulse buys, late-night orders, and social-media-driven wants included, and help them build habits that stick without the shame. ### Your safe-to-spend number The heart of the app is a feature called DPR, or Daily Purchase Rate, powered by TensorFlow Lite. It studies your past spending and works out how much you can safely spend today while still staying on track for your goals, then keeps adjusting that number as your income and expenses shift. The clever part is that the model runs entirely on-device, which means your financial data never leaves your phone, the answers come back instantly, and it keeps working even with no internet connection. Instead of a static budget you blow past and forget, DPR is a living boundary that moves with your real life. ### A second opinion before you buy The other half is SmartSpend, a purchase advisor built on the Google Gemini API. Thinking about a new pair of sneakers or concert tickets? You type it in, and the AI weighs the decision against your current budget health, how much you actually want it, and what it would do to your DPR, then hands back a score from 1 to 10 along with a warm, conversational explanation. It reads less like a bank warning and more like advice from a financially savvy friend, so you pick up the reasoning in the moment instead of just being told no. ### Built for a phone, and for Gen Z The frontend is written in Flutter, giving MoneyMaxxing a sleek, responsive feel with smooth animations and a single codebase across iOS and Android. Interactive dashboards show real-time spending trends and colorful category breakdowns, so you can see exactly where your money goes each day. On the device, SQLite stores transactions locally so you can log income and spending offline and have it sync back up once you reconnect, while a Node.js and Express backend with MongoDB handles cloud storage and longer-term analytics, leaving plenty of room to grow. ### The hard parts All of this came together in a 36-hour sprint, and it was not smooth. Getting TensorFlow Lite to run cleanly inside Flutter took real effort, as did tuning the Gemini responses to stay accurate and genuinely useful rather than generic. The biggest call was pivoting from React Native to Flutter partway through the build, a costly decision under a ticking clock, but the one that gave us the native performance and clean ML integration the app needed to feel like it truly lives on your phone. By the end, MoneyMaxxing had working on-device DPR, a fully functional SmartSpend advisor, and a gamified interface that makes budgeting feel rewarding rather than restrictive. The roadmap goes further: bank integration through Plaid, cloud syncing across devices, and gamified touches like spending streaks, achievement badges, and weekly savings challenges. Further out, we want natural-language questions like Can I buy this if I skip eating out this week? to return real, behavior-aware answers, turning a budgeting app into a personal finance companion that actually gets you.

At a glance

Timeline: Mar 2025
Type: Hackathon Project
Event: HackPrinceton Spring 2025
Award: Honorable Mentions - Finance Track

Technologies

Dart
Flutter
TensorFlow Lite (LiteRT)
Google Gemini API
SQLite
Node.js
Express.js
MongoDB
AI/ML (On-Device Inference)
Mobile App Development (Cross-Platform)

Photos

The HackPrinceton Spring 2025 opening ceremony, kicking off the retro-themed Hack Princeton
MoneyMaxxing named in the Capital One Honorable Mentions at HackPrinceton

Links

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