Congrats to the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend Winners!

We are so excited to announce the winners of the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend, the first of five challenges kicking off this year's Hacktoberfest!

This was our most participated-in challenge to date, nearly tripling our previous record for submissions. We asked you to build something with open-source AI at its core for one real person in your life, and you showed up for your parents, grandparents, siblings, classmates, roommates, and friends. Many of you told us how the person you built for reacted, and those stories made judging both a joy and a challenge.

Thank you to everyone who participated. Your projects show exactly why open models matter: private data stays at home, tools run without a credit card, and builders get to shape AI around the people they care about.

Now, let's celebrate our winners!

🎉 Congratulations To…

Featured Prize Category Winners

Prize Category Winners

Prizes

Our overall winner will receive:

• $250 USD
• DEV++ Membership
• Exclusive DEV badge

Our featured prize category winners will each receive:

• $200 USD
• Exclusive DEV badge

Our prize category winners will each receive:

• $100 USD
• Exclusive DEV badge

All participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge.

A huge thank you to our partners, Render, Prior Labs, Thinking Machines, Arduino, DigitalOcean, Google, Backboard, ElevenLabs, Entire, GitHub, Mastra, MongoDB, SerpApi, Sentry, Temporal, and Tiger Data, for making these prizes possible!

What's Next?

Hacktoberfest is just getting started! We're launching a new challenge every week this month. Each challenge is a fresh start, so it's not too late to jump in. Week 1 is happening now:

Week 2 launches Monday, October 12, with a brand-new theme. Register for the upcoming challenges to be notified as details drop:

Happy Hacktoberfest 💜