With only a month left in the semester, many students are feeling the strain of their meal plans running low. But a sophomore at Binghamton University has created a website that helps budget those waning funds.

David Axelrod, who is majoring in business administration, was walking back from dinner one night when his friend said he had to calculate a daily allowance to make his meal plan last.

When students returned from spring break this semester, Axelrod launched rationalnibbler.com as a free service for all BU students. Students are able to log in to the website with either their B-Number or Pods ID and password. The information goes through Sodexo’s server, which is a secure network. The website then gathers all of the user’s meal plan information from Sodexo and presents it in an organized, clear format.

The website informs students of how much money is left on their meal plan, how much a student spends per purchase, calculates a daily allowance to last until the semester’s end and the percentage they can afford to splurge or cut back. Students can also see how many times they have swiped their cards in a semester, a pie chart explaining where they most frequently eat on campus, daily transactions and notable transactions in which they spent over $15 in a day.

Axelrod said that while student’s transaction history and meal plan total is available on the Sodexo Dining Services website, he wanted it all aggregated in one place.

“I knew this data was available online and students can access it, but it’s not presented in an easy-to-read way, so I sat down with my tablet and started banging out the website,” Axelrod said. “If you can plan in advance and mitigate that [budgeting], you can probably have a lower stress rate during finals.”

Axelrod has been teaching himself coding for nearly two years and is a participant in HackBU and the Association for Computing Machinery. He constructed the website in just one week over spring break and continues to add features. One such feature will be a nutritional component, in which students can see the nutritional facts of each item purchased. Students are currently also able to see a menu feature, which is updated weekly and allows students to see the options for upcoming meals in each of the dining halls.

The site currently has over 2,900 page views and 918 users along with a suggestion box. Axelrod said he encourages students to give him suggestions for potential further implementations. He is currently working with Jesse Pelzar, a freshman majoring in electrical engineering, and Joseph Lee, a junior majoring in computer science, for design and advertising help. Lee said the website is specifically designed for Binghamton students since the nutritional database is only focused on what is being served on campus.

“There is an increasing number of students on campus who are interested in working out and what they eat,” Lee said. “I mean, it’s only natural that as you get older, people want to be more fit and look out for their own health.”

Elizabeth Slade, a sophomore majoring in psychology, said that this website will be helpful since it provides a way to see all of student’s meal plan information at once.

“I feel like I spend a lot more money than I should be and this could tell me exactly how much money I should be spending,” Slade said. “Sometimes you don’t even know how much you’re spending because they don’t ever tell you.”

As a member of the Entrepreneur Learning Community, Axelrod has worked with Dickinson faculty master Kim Jaussi. She has helped promote his website and said Axelrod is an entrepreneur who is constantly thinking of solutions for issues.

“David has an amazing mind that is absolutely never at rest,” Jaussi said. “David is a rare human being and I know that we here at Binghamton have the next Steve Jobs on our campus right now.”