One engine. Hackathons or hiring.
Run a public hackathon. Or use the same surface as a hands-on hiring assessment. Same registration, same scoring, same certificates, with different framing. $2 to create, 45-day max lead time, no refunds, and we do not host your artefacts.
Key facts
- Creation fee
- $2 USD, flat, non-refundable
- Email add-on
- $10 USD, optional, covers up to 2,500 recipients
- Lead time
- 45 days max from create to start
- Postponements
- 2 free; the third locks the date
- Max registrations
- 2,500 per event, hard cap
- Max active
- 500 concurrent; we recommend cloning past this
- Registration
- SSO + LinkedIn URL required; Twitter optional
- Artefact hosting
- None; public URLs only, hashed at submit
Same engine, different framing.
Public hackathon
Open registration, sponsor brand on every cert, leaderboard goes public when results drop. Run a 48-hour sprint on an open problem in your stack.
Looks like
- · Q3 Agentic Ops Sprint, sponsored by an AI infra vendor
- · University AI Build Week with $5k credit prize pool
- · Internal innovation day for a 200-person engineering org
Hands-on hiring assessment
Private invite list, role-pinned brief, leaderboard stays internal. Hire the people whose submitted work clears your bar.
Looks like
- · Hire an AI Analyst: give 5 finalists the same 4-hour brief
- · Forward-Deployed Engineer roster sweep before paid interviews
- · AI Solutions Consultant audition with a real customer brief
What you pay for, what you get.
Creation
One-timeFlat fee. One event record, full feature set, up to 2,500 SSO registrations, scoring, certs, sponsor logo, public or private listing.
Email add-on
OptionalOptional. We send kickoff, reminder, deadline, results, and cert-ready emails to your registered participants. Add it at creation or anytime before kickoff.
Postpone
LifecycleTwo free schedule changes per hackathon. The third locks the date; clone the event instead. Honest signal that the organiser is in trouble, not a circumstance.
Hard limits
- · $2 creation fee, $10 optional email add-on.
- · 45 days max between create and start.
- · 2,500 registrations max per event.
- · 500 active participants before we recommend cloning.
- · 2 free postponements, then the date locks.
- · 1 to 10 organisers per event.
Free to enter. Free to receive a cert. You keep your work.
SSO sign-in (Google or Microsoft), LinkedIn URL, optional Twitter, register. Submit your code link, video link, optional deck link before the deadline. We hash every URL at submission time so you can prove the work is yours, and so editing it later shows up on the public verify page.
01
Register
SSO + LinkedIn. Twitter optional. We close at 2,500 registrations or the registration deadline, whichever comes first.
02
Build & submit
Submit public URLs: GitHub repo, YouTube/Loom walkthrough, optional deck. We hash each one with SHA-256 and timestamp it.
03
Get certified
Auto-issued participation certificate with the sponsor's name and logo. Prize-tier certs go to the ranked top entries. PNG + PDF, shareable everywhere.
Preview the entire creation flow. Then decide if $2 is worth it.
We do not refund the $2 creation fee under any circumstance. That is intentional. The fee exists to filter out drive-by events. So before you click pay, here is the entire flow, step by step, including the attestation we ask you to tick.
Step 1
Preview (no sign-in yet)
Step 2
Sign in (SSO)
Step 3
Sponsor + extras (optional)
Step 4
Confirm + pay $2
- ☐ I understand the $2 fee is non-refundable.
- ☐ I will host my own datasets and resources: jusCode does not store participant artefacts.
- ☐ I have 2 free postponements; the third locks the date.
Want to see a fully populated example? A read-only sample event ships in Phase 3.
Honest about scope.
We do
- · Run registration, scoring, leaderboard, and cert issue
- · Hash every submitted URL at submission time (SHA-256 + timestamp)
- · Re-fetch hashes later (1 hour, 1 week, 1 year) to detect tampering
- · Generate cert PNG + PDF, host on Firebase Storage with a public URL
- · Render a public verify page per cert (tamper flag included)
- · Stamp the sponsor name + logo (500×500 → scaled) on every cert
We don't
- · Host your participants' code, decks, or videos; public URLs only
- · Store anything beyond metadata + receipt + your event content
- · Escrow or distribute prize credits (sponsor honours direct)
- · Force participants to use jusCode credits; bring any AI tool
- · Refund the $2 creation fee or the $10 email add-on
- · Show admin staff the contents of submissions, just paid/unpaid + counts
Hash receipts: how we prove the work is yours.
When you hit submit, we GET each public URL you provided and compute SHA-256 of its response body. The hash + a timestamp land on your submission record. Your certificate's verify page exposes those hashes publicly so any reviewer can recompute them.
Recommended packaging
- 1. Tag your GitHub repo before submission:
git tag hackathon-submit && git push --tags, and submit the tag URL, not the branch URL. - 2. Upload your walkthrough video to YouTube as unlisted (not private), or a Loom with a public link. Don't replace it after submitting.
- 3. If you include a deck, use a static PDF URL, not a Google Slides edit link that you might update later.
- 4. Editing any of these after submission breaks the hash. Your cert's verify page will show the tamper flag publicly, recoverable only by re-submitting with a new URL (and a new submission timestamp).
Starter briefs by role. Edit freely.
Need a problem statement? Pick one. Each comes with a starter dataset, a 5-criteria rubric, and a reference exemplar where we have one. The full library renders at /library once Phase 9 ships.
Product Manager
Turn three support tickets into a backlog item with acceptance criteria, using any AI tool.
Project Manager
Automate a weekly status report from a JSON of 30 Jira-shaped issues.
Business Analyst
Process-map a 6-step manual approval; produce target state + gap analysis.
AI Sales / Solutions Consultant
Build a 5-minute custom demo + exec deck for a supplied customer brief.
AI Tester / QA Analyst
Build a harness that flags hallucinations + tone violations on 200 emails.
AI Analyst
Benchmark three OSS models on a 100-prompt eval; write up what the numbers mean.
Operations Manager
Dashboard for inventory health with anomaly callouts and a weekly digest.
Customer Success Manager
Design a churn-risk score from subscription+usage CSV; defend the weights.
Implementation Consultant
Integrate a mock CRM with a mock helpdesk; document assumptions + rollback.
Data Analyst
Forecast next-quarter revenue from a 24-month series; explain it to a non-analyst.
Bring your own credits. Bring any credits.
Sponsor prizes can be jusCode credits, OpenAI credits, GCP credits, Azure credits, Anthropic credits, swag, cash: anything the sponsor can fulfil. We capture the prize description and the sponsor's fulfilment contact. Distribution is the sponsor's job; we don't escrow third-party credits.
There is no lock-in to jusCode credits. Using jusCode under the hood does help your participants track cost, but a hackathon on this platform is welcome to offer zero jusCode prizes if that's the right call.
Sponsor logo on the certificate
- · 500×500 PNG, transparent background preferred.
- · Scaled to ~180px and placed in the top-right corner of every issued certificate.
- · One sponsor per hackathon. Need more? List them as extra prize sponsors; they appear in the prize description, not on the cert face.
- · Logo locks after the first cert issues. Edit the sponsor name on a cert only by revoking and re-issuing.
Plain answers.
Can I get a refund if I change my mind?
No. The $2 creation fee and the $10 email add-on are non-refundable. The fee exists specifically to filter casual creates. We make this loud during checkout for that reason. See refund policy.
What if I run out of postponements?
The date field locks at the second postponement. Clone the event with a new $2; registrations don't transfer, but your metadata, problem statement, rubric, and sponsor config do. Cleaner for participants than a third schedule change.
Do you store the code participants submit?
No. We store the URL, a SHA-256 of the response body, the response headers we saw at submission time, and the timestamp. The artefact itself stays at the URL the participant gave us. They retain full ownership and can take it down at any time (though the verify page won't re-fetch in that case).
What happens if a participant edits their GitHub repo after submitting?
Our integrity cron re-fetches periodically and compares hashes. A mismatch sets tamper_flag=true on the submission and the cert's public verify page shows the flag. Organisers can revoke certs over this; we do not auto-revoke in v1.
Can sponsors offer non-jusCode credits as prizes?
Yes. OpenAI, GCP, Azure, Anthropic, AWS, swag, cash: any credit the sponsor can deliver. The platform is honest about its own role: we don't escrow or distribute. We capture the description + the sponsor's fulfilment contact and the sponsor handles the rest.
Can I run a private hiring assessment instead of a public hackathon?
Yes. Pick Hackathons-for-Jobs at creation. Same engine, but the listing isn't indexed and only invited emails can register. Your candidates get the same SSO + LinkedIn + submission flow.
What do admins (Kalmantic platform staff) see?
Summary stats and payment status. Number of registrations, active participants, submissions. Paid / unpaid. That's it. No problem statements, no submissions, no organiser messages. The boundary is deliberate.
When does this ship?
Design is frozen as of today. Implementation phases (P3 onward, per HACKATHONS-DESIGN.md) sit behind a Firebase + Postgres + Storage backend that's not yet funded. This page and the supporting blog ship now so you can read the deal and weigh in on the design.
Why hands-on assessment beats a résumé.
The why behind Hackathons-for-Jobs sits in a companion blog post on the marketing site, covering what this format catches that an interview misses, and where it breaks.