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We've both missed deadlines that stung. Not because we weren't trying — because finding out about contests in the first place was a full-time job. So we fixed that.
If you reached this page looking for a sweepstakes platform, you may be thinking of a different site. Contest Hopper (contesthopper.com) is exclusively for skill-based competitions.
“We didn't set out to build a product. We just got tired of finding out about hackathons two days after they closed.”
It was a Devfolio hackathon — real prizes, real judges, the kind that actually shows up on a resume. We heard about it from someone in class. Submissions had closed two days earlier. We weren't distracted or lazy. We just didn't know it existed.
The contests were out there. Dozens of them, across Devfolio, Unstop, HackerEarth, Kaggle, Topcoder, half a dozen college portals. Each one announced on its own channel, on its own timeline. Staying on top of it meant checking fifteen different sites every single day. Most people don't. Most people miss things.
We asked a dumb, obvious question: why isn't there one place for all of this?
When we couldn't find an answer, we built it ourselves. Nights, weekends, around classes. When we showed it to classmates, the reaction was pretty consistent: “Wait, this actually exists now?”
That was 2024. Contest Hopper now tracks 500+ competitions across 12 categories, refreshed every 24 hours. It's free and it's staying that way. We built it because we needed it, and we're not about to charge people for something that should've existed years ago.
Two CS students, no investors, no company behind it. We built the thing we needed and figured other people probably needed it too.
There are other contest directories. Most of them are half-maintained, full of expired listings, or require you to sign up before you can see anything useful. These are the specific things we do differently — and why it actually matters when you're trying to find something to enter.
You already know the drill. Devfolio for hackathons, Unstop for college fests, HackerEarth for coding rounds, Kaggle if you're into data. Plus Topcoder, HackerRank, and whatever that startup competition was that your senior mentioned once and you promptly forgot to bookmark. We pull all of it into one feed, every day, so you don't have to.
We've spent enough time on directories that listed contests with deadlines from three months ago, prize amounts pulled from thin air, and registration links that 404'd. It's exhausting. So before anything goes up on Contest Hopper, we check it — deadline, organizer, prize, link. If it doesn't hold up, it doesn't get published. Simple as that.
Some contests open and close in a long weekend. A listing that was accurate on Monday can be useless by Thursday. We re-check everything daily — so if a contest gets cancelled, moves its deadline, or quietly closes early, it won't be sitting here pretending to still be open. What you see is what's actually happening right now.
Not everyone's ready for a national championship in their first semester, and there's no point drowning in listings that require five years of experience when you're just getting started. Filter by skill level and find things you can actually enter today. Then come back when you're ready for something bigger. The platform adjusts — you don't have to.
It's not just coding. We track design challenges, data science, content writing, photography, video, music, startup pitches, marketing — if people compete in it and judges score it, we want it here. We add categories as we come across new ones, because not everyone who wants to compete writes code.
We're students. We built this for students. There's no paid tier with better listings, no account wall before you can see deadlines, no 'sign up to unlock filters.' Everything is open, everything is free, and that's not changing. We'd feel pretty hypocritical charging for access to a tool we built because we were fed up with barriers.
Contest Hopper isn't a scraper that dumps everything it finds into a database. Every listing gets checked by hand before it goes up — and checked again every 24 hours after that.
We gather listings from Devfolio, Unstop, HackerEarth, Kaggle, Topcoder, photography communities, design forums, college portals, and a lot of other places. This is just raw data at this point — nothing is published yet.
Someone actually looks at every listing: is the deadline right? Is the organizer real? Does the prize match what the official page says? Is the registration link working? If something's off, it gets dropped — not published with a little warning badge, just removed entirely.
Contests change. Deadlines shift, organizers cancel things, URLs break. We go through everything live on the site every day. If something closes early or gets cancelled, it's gone within 24 hours — not left up for weeks with no update.
If you spot something that seems outdated or off, you can flag it. We review every report the same day. We'd rather hear about it from someone using the site than have bad info sitting here.
This is why Contest Hopper has fewer total listings than some platforms — we'd rather show you 500 real ones than 5,000 that include contests from two years ago.
Two people. One shared frustration. One platform.
Contest Hopper is built and maintained by just the two of us — no agency, no contractors. Every design decision, every feature, every piece of content comes from us directly. When something breaks, we're the ones who fix it, usually before we've finished our coffee.
Pranava was the one who first said out loud what we'd both been thinking — that there had to be a better way to find these things. He'd missed one too many hackathons and turned that frustration into something real. Contest Hopper starts with him.
Vamsi built everything you're looking at — the design, the frontend, the backend, the whole thing. He did it between assignments, without a team or a budget. If something feels smooth or looks right on this platform, that's him.
There are contests open right now that you don't know about yet — because they're buried across a dozen different platforms. Contest Hopper puts 500+ verified listings in one place, filtered and updated daily. Takes about ten seconds to find something worth entering.
Browse Contests No account required.