CloudInsights.ai: From Capstone to SaaS

When I started my third semester at SAIT, I had no idea what this project would have in store for us. Back then, my brother Jacob, another teammate, and I were preparing for our capstone, which would officially begin in semester four, just four months away. We had a local nonprofit as our client, an organization that helps disabled people find work, and we were going to build them a system to manage job sites, employee assignments, and personal medical data.

Things went smoothly at first. We had data models, system flows, and a full UI prototype built out in Figma. But right as semester four began, everything changed. The teammate who brought us the client left the group, switched classes, and took the client with them. Suddenly, we had no project, no plan, and no starting point.

Rather than panic, we decided to start fresh. That’s where the idea for CloudInsights.ai was born, and where Derek and Zumar joined the team. Initially, it was meant to be a system for monitoring cloud deployment costs, something that could sit on top of AWS Cost Explorer and make sense of the numbers. But after weeks of refinement and discussion about product-market fit, we pivoted into what CloudInsights.ai is today: a small business analytics platform.

Our goal became simple but ambitious: build a product that sits on top of complex accounting software like QuickBooks and transforms it into something small businesses without dedicated accounting teams can actually use. Instead of overwhelming charts and tables, we wanted interactive dashboards that answer real questions:

• Revenue: How is my revenue trending, and where is it coming from
• Expenses: Where am I overspending, and what can I cut?
• Profitability: Is my business truly healthy right now?
• Anomalies: What unexpected changes should I be aware of?

The First Milestone: Seeing the Vision

Once we committed to this pivot, the first milestone was clear: implement all four dashboards with mock business data. This gave us something to see, touch, and iterate on, and it was the moment the project stopped being just an idea.

Derek was hugely helpful with planning, doing research on SaaS-style UIs, building out the UI, and creating the chart components. Zumar worked with Derek to execute the UI plan and polish the dashboards. Jacob focused on backend modeling, the original Firestore integration before we moved to Supabase, and planning the backend architecture. I kept the project aligned with our product vision and oversaw the overall architecture.

One of the hardest design challenges was figuring out how to make these dashboards tell a story. We didn’t want to just recreate QuickBooks views. Instead, we focused on building primary and secondary questions into each dashboard and calculating metrics and health scores that weren’t easily available elsewhere. This is how we made the dashboards not just informative but actionable.

The Turning Point: Real Integration

The most important technical decision we made was fully integrating QuickBooks Online using Intuit’s OAuth authentication. That single step transformed the app from a capstone project into a real SaaS product.

Around the same time, we started treating deployment seriously, setting up preview and production environments, configuring environment variables, and putting proper deployment workflows in place. Suddenly, the whole project felt very real.

Capstone Demo Day: CapCon

Our biggest validation came at SAIT’s CapCon. Over three hours, we live-demoed our application to more than 20 people. This included CEOs, industry leaders, faculty, SAIT staff, and fellow students. The feedback was incredible, and we received a commendation from the academic chair of our program.

Post-Capstone: Getting Production-Ready

At the time of CapCon, our QuickBooks integration wasn’t quite production-ready. Since then, I’ve focused on finalizing the integration and working through Intuit’s compliance checklist so we can go live with real production API keys.

Right now, CloudInsights.ai has a public demo deployed, and our next release will include full user authentication and live QuickBooks data via the Accounting API. This critical final step will make it ready for real customers.

Lessons Learned

If I had to sum up this entire journey, the biggest lesson I learned is that adaptability is key. Losing our original project felt like a major setback at first, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. It forced us to start fresh and build something we’re truly proud of.

I also became deeply familiar with the superpower that is delegation. My team of four {Jacob, Derek, Zumar, and myself} was instrumental in planning, executing, and presenting. Even though our classes together are over, we’re continuing to work together on the app because we believe it can genuinely help small businesses succeed.