The core insight behind Gooblet was that most people do not want to keep opening a finance app just to answer one question: how much can I safely spend right now? Instead of building another dashboard that gets ignored, we focused on surfacing the answer directly through an iOS home screen widget using Scriptable.
Gooblet centered the experience around one clear number, a safe-to-spend value, and paired it with a 3D procedural Three.js mascot that shifted emotional state based on spending behavior. That gave the app a little personality while still keeping the financial signal obvious. We also built danger-day predictions so users could see when they were on track to run into trouble before it actually happened.
In 24 hours, we got from zero to a working demo that included live Plaid integration, full authentication, transaction syncing, risk classification, the safe-to-spend calculator, and the iOS widget layer. That was the part I was most proud of. It was not just a mocked-up concept, it was a real system with data moving through it, and it ultimately earned 3rd place at the hackathon.
I was the team lead and backend developer, handling the API architecture, Plaid integration, auth system, and database layer. The stack combined a React, TypeScript, and Tailwind frontend with a Node.js, Express, and Prisma backend. Huge credit to the team that made it work under the deadline: Aiden Cintron, Ryan Orjuela, Alexander Curcio, and Robert Marcus Sostak.