Prizes & Judging
Every submitted project gets judged. There is $500 in cash for the top project, plus licenses and domains from our sponsors. Here is everything you can win and what the judges look for.
Prizes
$500 in cash for the top project, plus licenses and domains from our sponsors. Here is everything on the table:
- $500 cash · Banana Hacks
Cash prize for the top project of the weekend. - CodeCrafters VIP memberships · CodeCrafters
Every member of the winning teams gets VIP access: 2 years for 1st place, 1 year for 2nd, and 6 months for 3rd. - 50 Interview Cake licenses · Interview Cake
Full-access licenses to Interview Cake's coding interview course. - Free .xyz domains · XYZ
A .xyz domain, free for the first year, to put your project on the web.
Award categories
Category awards call out projects that do one thing especially well. You do not need to apply for them; every submission is considered.
Best Creative Tool
The project that most usefully puts generative AI in the hands of someone making something.
Best Fine-tune
The most impressive custom model, LoRA adapter, or training pipeline built during the weekend.
Most Surprising Output
The project that produced something nobody expected, its own authors included.
People's Choice
Voted on by participants during demo day.
How projects are judged
Every project is scored 1 to 5 on each of five equally weighted criteria:
- Technical Execution and Difficulty
- How technically impressive is the build? Did the team tackle real engineering challenges with image AI, computer vision, or generative models, with thoughtful model choice and non-trivial integration? Thin API wrappers should score lower.
- Innovation and Creativity
- How original is the idea? Does the project take a fresh angle, combine tools unexpectedly, or explore a use case that feels genuinely new? Generic clones of well-known apps score lower than projects that surprise the judge.
- Use of the Image AI Theme
- Is image AI, computer vision, or a generative visual model a core part of the project, not a cosmetic add-on? How fully does it embrace the "image everything" theme? If the image AI could be removed without breaking the core experience, score lower.
- Impact and Usefulness
- Does the project address a real problem or serve a real need? Is there a clear user, a clear benefit, and a plausible path to someone actually using this beyond the hackathon weekend? Score higher for projects that make "who cares" easy to answer.
- Design, Presentation, and Demo
- Is the interface clean and the visual output polished? Does the demo video (3 min or less) and Devpost write-up clearly communicate what the project is, what problem it solves, and how it works? A great project buried under a confusing demo scores lower.
What you submit
Send us a working demo (a live URL or video), your GitHub repository, and no more than 500 words on what you built and why. A working link is better than a polished video. Submissions close at 11:59 PM AoE on Sunday, October 11, 2026. See the full schedule or the FAQ for details.