Verdant
Know your footprint, shrink it.
Timeline
20 weeks
Investment
$68,000
Platforms
iOS & Android
Category
Sustainability / Carbon
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Overview
Verdant turns everyday spending and travel into an automatic, personalized carbon footprint, then helps users cut it with tailored actions and buy verified offsets from vetted projects. A community layer with challenges, leaderboards, and badges keeps people coming back.
The challenge
Most carbon apps rely on tedious manual logging, so people quit within days. The client wanted footprint tracking to happen automatically, inferred from real financial and travel data, while keeping the experience trustworthy, private, and motivating rather than guilt-inducing.
Our solution
We connected bank, transit, and home-energy accounts through a financial-data aggregator, then mapped transactions and trips to emissions factors to estimate CO₂e automatically. A recommendations engine surfaces the highest-impact actions for each user, and a curated marketplace lets them offset through Gold Standard verified projects. Social challenges and a team leaderboard turn reduction into a habit.
Whatwebuilt
Automatic footprint dashboard (monthly CO₂e vs. target, trend over time, by category)
Auto-tracking via connected bank, transit, and home-energy accounts
Personalized, ranked reduction actions with estimated savings
Verified offset marketplace (reforestation, wind, mangrove, Gold Standard certified)
Auto-offset subscription (offset monthly automatically)
Community: challenges, team leaderboards, badges, and friend activity feed
Goal setting and progress tracking
Technology stack
- Mobile
- React Native (TypeScript)
- Financial data
- Plaid (bank & spend), transit and utility integrations
- Emissions engine
- Python service mapping transactions/trips to emissions factors (custom + open datasets)
- Backend
- Node.js (NestJS), PostgreSQL, Redis
- Payments
- Stripe (offset purchases & subscriptions)
- Infra
- AWS, encrypted financial-data handling, webhook pipeline for transaction sync
The team
Product designer, 2 mobile engineers, 1 backend engineer, 1 data engineer, QA engineer, plus a delivery lead.
Timeline, 20 weeks
Discovery & emissions methodology (3) → Design system (2) → Account linking & sync (3) → Footprint engine & dashboard (4) → Actions & offset marketplace (3) → Community & gamification (3) → QA & launch (2).
Hard problems we solved
Translating noisy transaction data into believable emissions estimates required a careful categorization and emissions-factor model, plus graceful handling of unknowns. Financial data linking demanded bank-grade security and privacy messaging so users felt safe connecting accounts.
Results & impact
Verdant removed the biggest reason sustainability apps fail, manual entry, by making tracking passive and accurate enough to trust. The offset marketplace gave the client a clear, ethical revenue stream tied directly to user impact.
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