Nobody publishes this, so first-time organizers guess and then panic three weeks out.
We've run five events end to end. Rough shape of where the money goes for ~100 people over two days:
Food is the monster. It's usually the single largest line and it scales linearly with headcount, so it's the number that decides whether you can afford the event at all
Venue is either free or ruinous, with almost nothing in between. Universities and coworking spaces will often give it up for a logo.
Prizes matter less than organizers think. We've seen 23 teams compete hard for prizes that cost under a few hundred dollars total. People come for the weekend, not the payout.
Software is the line most people don't budget for and then pay for in weekends of manual work instead.
If you've run one: what did you underestimate? I'm curious whether food dominates everyone's budget the way it does ours.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 I'm Ilgar, founder of HackathonHost.
If you've ever organized a hackathon, a game jam, or a demo day, you know the tool hell: a Google Sheet for registrations, a Discord channel for team-finding, a Typeform for submissions, something else entirely for jury scoring, and then your post-event weekend disappears into generating certificates by hand.
That overhead is survivable if you have an ops team. Most organizers don't. It's usually two or three people, a budget that came out of someone's pocket, and 100 participants who still expect the event to feel professional.
That's who we built for.
🛠️ What's in it
- Full event lifecycle — custom intake forms, team matchmaking, project submissions, public voting galleries, one dashboard.
- Day-of controls — pitch countdown timers, leaderboard displays, live jury scoring rubrics.
- 100% white-label — your logo, your colors, your domain. Participants see your event, not our tool. We're not organizers and we never appear as one.
- The weekend-saving part — QR-verified certificates generated and emailed automatically, sponsor-ready analytics exported in a click.
Not theoretical: 5 events have run end-to-end on it so far — 290+ participants, 100+ teams. Turkic Game Jam 2026 issued 80+ certificates automatically to 75 participants across 23 teams. Nikita Yudin, Project Lead at Xsolla, has sat on the jury twice.
💸 $99 flat per event. No per-participant fees, no seat counts, no tiers. There's a free Explore sandbox if you want to click around first — no card.
🤝 And if you run events regularly — a student club, a community chapter, a studio, a university program — we'd rather build something ongoing than sell you a one-off. Partners get free event tokens, and that includes educational institutions. Just reply here or reach out through the platform and we'll sort it out.
🎁 For Product Hunt specifically: 30% off with PH30LAUNCH.
I'm in the comments all day and I want the brutal version — especially if you've organized something and we're missing the thing that would actually have saved you. What broke last time you ran an event? 👇
The hackathon templates look solid. One thing I'd love to see is a built-in team matching feature where solo participants can post their skills and find collaborators based on complementary tech stacks before the event starts.
@felixfelicis Thank you for your comment. The feature you mentioned exists already. Teambuilding module: solo participants post a profile with their skills and the role they want, then browse and request to join teams before the event opens. Hosts approve the rosters at the end.
Which mostly tells me we're not showing it well enough on the page. Fair hit.
The automatic part is missing though. Right now you browse and ask; the system doesn't tell you "your team has no backend dev, here are three going spare." Is that what you were picturing? If so I'm curious how you'd rank it. By the gap in the team, or something else?
this looks solid for someone running smaller events on a budget. one thing that would be really useful though is a built in sponsor showcase page where sponsors can upload logos, set tier levels, and see basic metrics on visibility. honestly a lot of hackathons live and die by sponsor relationships, and right now it seems like that whole side is kind of on you to handle separately
@marilynmanson Thanks for the comment!
Both of those exist already. Logos and tier levels on the event pages, and the analytics export is built so you can send it straight to a sponsor once the event wraps.
Sponsors can have their own login too. There's no separate sponsor account type; we use a flexible guest role instead, so you decide what any given guest sees and point it at whoever needs it. Beats emailing screenshots around.
The relationship point is fair though. At the small end one sponsor often covers the entire budget. What do yours actually ask you for afterwards?
One thing that would make this way more useful for our student orgs is a built-in submission gallery or portfolio page where judges and sponsors can browse all projects after the event, with links to demos and team info. Right now we end up cobbling that together with a separate Google Site afterward.