Why We’re Throwing $75K (and a Lot of Love) at Bolt’s World-Record Hackathon

The world’s largest online hackathon kicked off on May 30 and it’s already crushing the previous record: 76,246 builders have registered as I’m writing this (probably more by the time you’re reading), all chasing more than $1 million in cash prizes. Submissions stay open until June 30 @ 2 PM PT, so you still have four solid weeks to join the party, and yes, you can absolutely ship something great in that time

You might’ve caught wind of this already, but we’ve officially jumped in and putting some serious skin in the game 💰

The Make More Money Award prize pool

In addition to the globally available prizes (over half a million dollars’ worth, including a $100k USD grand prize), we’re contributing an extra $75,000 USD (!) to a custom challenge: The Make More Money Award. This means that this particular challenge has three (3!) times the cash prizes compared to any other challenge, and gives you the best odds of actually taking home some cash

The top 3 apps in our challenge will take home $25,000 USD each, + we have a mystery prize we’ll announce later this week. It involves a one-in-a-kind in-person event. Bring a suitcase… 🗼

Our co-founder and CTO Miguel Carranza is joining the judging panel, so expect a founder-level eye for detail looking at product polish, quality, and – most importantly – real traction. We’ll be looking for teams or individual developers that not only integrate RevenueCat, but actually flip the switch and rack up trial subscribers before the deadline. No pudding, no proof

What You Need to Build

Our Make More Money Award goes towards developers that used Bolt (and maybe a few other tools 🤷) to build a mobile app, wherein they use the RevenueCat mobile SDK and paywall builder to acquire subscribers

You’ll need to:

1. Build a mobile app (iOS or Android) with Bolt
2. Have the RevenueCat SDK + Paywall Builder in play (showcase this in the demo video that accompanies your video)
3. Add your RevenueCat Project ID and a go find some users! (we’ll use project IDs to find apps that actually managed to gain some traction: this will *help* but isn’t the only thing that’ll decide who takes away the prizes)

We’ll publish videos and written content over the coming days and weeks, detailing how to:

• Picking a killer idea fast
• Maximizing your revenue with RevenueCat

And, RevenueCat developer advocate Perttu Lähteenlahti just wrote a guide detailing How to add subscriptions to a Bolt-generated Expo app

Keep an eye on the blog and socials: each additional post will drop as soon as it’s out of the oven

Livestream: How to actually make some money with your app

Block off June 16, 2025 at 9:00 AM PT. We’re co-hosting a live session with the Bolt team for all hackathon participants. Expect us to dig deep into finding users, and monetising them, with or without RevenueCat

But what about Shipaton?

Long-term RevenueCat fans will know that we host our own annual celebration of shipping in September: Shiptember. Last year, for the first time, we combined that with a global mobile hackathon: Shipaton. Rest assured, we’re still planning on doing Shipaton this year, and it’ll be bigger and better than ever. Expect over 10x the cash prizes, special perks for the winners that’ll blow your mind, swag for participants, in-person events, and more. We’ve been prepping for months, and will continue to do so while participating in Bolt’s competition. Expect some news about Shipaton shortly after (or even during) the hackathon 🫢

It’s Not Too Late. Really

Bolt’s own tutorials show people spinning up working apps in under ten minutes, and we’ve watched founders go from zero to App Store (with early users!) in just a handful of evenings. If you’ve been waiting for the nudge, consider this a shove

1. Register on Devpost
2. Fire up Bolt from a prompt (ideally, based on a little bit of market or user research)
3. Drop in RevenueCat, wire up Paywall Builder, and start finding those users
4. Ship, iterate, collect feedback, and – fingers crossed – collect one of those $25K checks

See you in the submission gallery!