VARSITYOS — AI Student OS

SA's first AI companion built specifically for South Africa's 11 million university and TVET college students. Not a generic productivity app. A system designed around the specific stressors of the SA student experience: NSFAS payment delays, load shedding during exam season, imposter syndrome in first-generation students, and surviving on a R50/day food budget.

Multi-Agent Architecture

8 independent Claude-powered agents reading from a shared Supabase database. Each agent has a distinct system prompt, a distinct function boundary, and a distinct trigger condition. They do not call each other — they read shared state and act independently.

Nova Companion — primary conversational AI. Trained on SA-specific context: NSFAS terminology, university module naming conventions, load shedding vocabulary, South African mental health resources. Surfaces SADAG and Lifeline SA helplines automatically when crisis language is detected in conversation, without the user having to ask.

Proactive Insights Agent — runs on dashboard load. Analyses current task completion rate, upcoming exam dates, budget burn rate, and last Nova conversation. Generates one prioritised insight card per session. Never repeating advice.

Daily Check-In Agent — triggered at 08:00 SAST. A one-question wellbeing pulse. Response feeds the wellness score graph. Aggregate data across check-ins surfaces burnout risk indicators to the student themselves (never to any third party).

Budget Coach Agent — analyses transaction entries against the student's NSFAS allowance. Generates a financial health score 0–100. Produces a plain-language breakdown of spend patterns and a concrete recommendation. Aware of SA-specific spend categories: airtime, taxi fare, grocery staples at Shoprite pricing.

Recipe Generator Agent — takes budget amount + dietary preferences + available ingredients → returns a full recipe with estimated cost in ZAR at current Pick n Pay / Shoprite pricing. Built because food insecurity is a real academic risk factor for SA students.

Study Planner Agent — generates personalised study plans from module list + exam dates + available hours. Grade calculator included. Exam prep guides generated per module.

Technical Decisions

PWA implementation for offline functionality — load shedding means reliable internet cannot be assumed. Zustand for global state management. React Hook Form + Zod for all input validation. PayFast for ZAR billing (PayPal and Stripe do not support SA bank accounts for most students).

Supabase RLS ensures each student's data — including mental health check-ins — is completely isolated. No student's wellness data is accessible to any other user or any admin query.

Pricing Philosophy

Free tier (15 AI messages/month) exists because a student with R0 in their account still deserves access. Paid tiers at R39 and R79/month — deliberately below the cost of one meal at a university cafeteria. Priced for the actual user, not the market average.

Stack: Next.js 14 · TypeScript · Supabase · Claude Sonnet + Haiku routing · PayFast · Zustand · React Hook Form + Zod · Vercel · PWA · PostHog · Sentry