Run a Developer Hackathon,
From Kickoff to Awards.
HackHQ is the platform behind Browser Use, Better Auth, Cursor, and many more community hackathons. Sponsor tracks, judging without accounts across parallel rooms, live results during the demo session, and a clean public gallery your community can share after.
From devtool teams running their flagship hackathons
Three community hackathons that ran on HackHQ in the last six months. AI startups, OSS companies, and devtool teams have used the same primitives to ship their biggest events.
Keep your registration tool. We handle everything after.
Most devtool teams already run RSVPs on Luma or Eventbrite. HackHQ slots in for the hackathon specific stuff: submissions, judging, live results.
Use the tool your community already RSVPs through.
Teams submit through a personal link, no accounts.
Rubric scoring on any device, parallel rooms, sponsor tracks.
Live leaderboard, certificates, public gallery.
Ten sponsors, zero spreadsheets
Teams pick their main Track and opt into Challenges during submission. Each sponsor sees their own ranked slate. No alt tabbing, no Notion glue, no manual sorting before judging.
What breaks during developer community hackathons
Real situations from devtool teams running their flagship events.
Sponsor tracks turn into a sorting nightmare
Six to ten sponsors, each with their own prize, each wanting to know which projects opted into their track. By demo time, organizers are alt tabbing between Notion, a Google Sheet, and Discord, asking the same question to every team.
Judges arrive ten minutes before demos, no setup time
Forty plus judges from Anthropic, OpenAI, YC, and partner companies showing up at a venue minutes before demos. Asking them to create an account on a niche platform is the fastest way to lose the panel.
In person demos, not async submissions
Public hackathon platforms expect a video plus a GitHub link, judged async. Devtool community hackathons are in person, with parallel demo rooms, live judging, and an awards ceremony that night. The platform needs to keep up.
What a community hackathon looks like on HackHQ
Sponsor tracks that sort themselves
Teams opt into the sponsor challenges that fit their build during submission. Each sponsor sees their own slate. No alt tabbing, no Notion bookkeeping.
Parallel Judging Rooms for live demo sessions
Run multiple judging rooms in parallel during demos, each with its own slate and rubric. Browser Use ran six rooms simultaneously at YC HQ. Each panel gets through its projects faster.
Judging without accounts, on any device
Personal scoring link by email. Judges score from the laptop at the table or the phone in their pocket, whichever is in their hand. No signup, no app to install. This is one of the biggest day to day differences from Devpost and Devfolio.
Live results during the demo session
Real time leaderboard, weighted averages, Borda Count for Top Picks. The moment judging closes, you have winners. Walk on stage and announce them.
A public project gallery your community can share
Every project gets a clean read only share link. Tweet it, post it to your community Slack or Discord, embed it in your changelog. Submissions outlive the event weekend.
Live in 30 minutes, no sales call
Sign up, create your event, share the submission link. Same afternoon. No demo required, no quote, no procurement loop. Public pricing from $199 per event.
Built for community hackathons
Run a Hackathon Your Community Will Remember.
Start free, no credit card required. Live in 30 minutes, with public pricing from $199 per event.