Student events should never die in a spreadsheet

Some of the best hackathons and game jams happen on campus: a faculty books an auditorium for a weekend, a student club rounds up teams, a few lecturers agree to judge — and suddenly 60 people are building things at 2 a.m. What usually kills the momentum isn't the ambition. It's the budget line that doesn't exist for "event software."

So we're removing it. Universities and education institutions get 3 free events every year — three event tokens, the credits that let you publish an event on HackathonHost, at no cost. Need a fourth? Read on: active hosts who help spread the word can be granted more.

What you get

A free event token is the same event credit paying organizers use. Nothing is trimmed:

Unlimited teams and participants — no caps, no per-seat fees
Public registration with custom questions and a teambuilding board
Jury scoring with weighted criteria — judges score from any phone
Live control — presentation timers, projector views, theme reveals, countdowns
Live polls and word clouds the whole room can join with a QR code
Certificates with QR verification for every participant
Full reports and exports when it's over — results, analytics, XLSX/DOCX bundles
White-label branding — your university's logo, name, and colors on everything

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, read how Odlar Yurdu University ran a $16,000 game jam end-to-end on HackathonHost — 64 participants, 13 teams, registration to final report.

Who qualifies

Universities and colleges
Schools, lyceums, and vocational institutions
Education programs, bootcamps, and academies

If you're running a hackathon, game jam, or similar competition for students, you're exactly who this is for.

Need more than three?

Three events a year covers most campus programs — a semester hackathon, a game jam, and something for orientation week. If you run more than that, we can grant additional free events to active hosts who help promote the platform. In practice that means things like:

Crediting HackathonHost on your event page, posters, and social posts
A short case study, testimonial, or set of photos we can publish
Introducing us to other faculties, student clubs, or partner institutions

There's no form, no minimum audience, and no contract. Tell us what you have in mind when you get in touch and we'll add the extra events to your account.

How to claim your free events

No application forms, no committees. It takes two minutes:

Go to the contact page and fill in the form
Tell us about your institution and the event you're planning — what it is, roughly when, and how many participants you expect
We'll get back to you and add your free event tokens directly to your host account

Don't have a host account yet? Create one for free — you can explore the fully-loaded sample event while you wait.

Why we're doing this

HackathonHost was born at university events. We've spent 5+ years running game jams and hackathons — many of them on campuses, with student teams, volunteer mentors, and lecturers as judges. We know these events run on enthusiasm and borrowed projectors, and we'd rather the tooling never be the reason one doesn't happen.

Student events also happen to be the best stress test a platform can get. Everybody wins.

Request your free events →