RevenueCat Shipaton 2026

Why it's worth your time

The Shipaton is RevenueCat's annual online hackathon, and the format is different from a weekend build: you have two months to actually ship an app. The submission period runs 31 July to 30 September 2026, entries must integrate the RevenueCat SDK to power at least one in-app purchase or serve ads through RevenueCat Ads, and the main competition expects the app to launch on the App Store, Google Play or the Samsung Galaxy Store inside the window. The prize table is large and unusually spread out — $740,000+ across a $100,000 grand prize and roughly twenty separate award categories, most paying $15,000 / $10,000 / $5,000 for first, second and third.

The reason it earns a place here is the Next Gen Award: a student-only category for active students, which pays $20,000 for first, $10,000 for second and $5,000 for third — raised from $15,000 at the top since our last check, confirmed on the official rules page and not just the marketing landing page. It is judged on a demo video and a link to a public open-source repository with a licence file, and the rules state outright that "No paid Apple or Google developer account or store release is required." That exemption is the whole point: it removes the app-store release requirement and the paid developer account that bind every other category, which is the single biggest cost barrier between an Indian undergraduate and a US app-store hackathon. You need an active student enrolment and a qualifying student or academic email address on Devpost, and entrants under the age of majority can enter from 13 with a parent or guardian agreeing to the rules.

Be clear-eyed about the shape of it. Twenty-odd categories means many more winners than a single-prize hackathon, but you are still shipping a real product against people who do this professionally, and there is a hard 30 September cutoff. Read your target category's own criteria before you start building — the awards reward very different things, from build-in-public documentation to design to raw revenue. And note the asymmetry: the main categories require the app's first public version to be released on the App Store, Google Play or the Samsung Galaxy Store inside the submission window, so an update to an app you already shipped does not qualify. The student category is the exception to all of that.