Alipay AI Payment and Guanchao Launch PAYATHON 2026 Hackathon with a ¥200,000 Prize Pool, Inviting Developers to Integrate Payments

From Vibe Coding to Skills and Agents, AI is opening a new round of entrepreneurial windows: one person can build an app, and a single skill can become a product. As the barriers to creation and development fall, new opportunities are emerging—turning the AI products you build into a business that users are willing to pay for.

Riding this wave, on October 24, Alipay AI Payment and Guanzha jointly launched the "PAYATHON 2026" annual hackathon, inviting developers to compete with their apps, Skills, or Agents: integrate payments, bring your ideas to the real market, and compete for a total prize pool of 200,000 yuan. Registration closes on December 1, and the offline finals will be held on December 26.

This hackathon is not just about creativity and technology; it looks even more at a product's value in real transactions. It is also an important move in Alipay AI Payment's "developer-first" product strategy: by continuously lowering the commercialization barrier for AI products, developers worry less about collecting payments, delivery, and pricing, and good projects can become good businesses faster.

Five tracks to bring works to market

An independent app or an Agent skill can both be a starting point for entry. This competition is open to individual developers and teams, with five tracks: two main tracks, Apps and Skills, centered on Vibe Pay and Skill Pay; and around Token Pay, Machine Pay, and Agent Pay, focusing on exploring usage-based billing, continuous subscriptions, and transaction scenarios between machines and agents.

The competition evaluates not only the completeness of product features and technical implementation, but also lists "commercialization performance" and "real user payments" as key selection criteria, letting participants test in real combat: Is the product easy to use? Are users willing to pay?

From "building it" to "selling it," developers need more than just code generation tools; they need a complete set of support that connects pricing strategy, payment fulfillment, and accounting settlement. This hackathon hopes to connect technical creation with business practice, letting developers compete with real integration and operational problems and find possibilities for sustainable product development.

The first batch of orders is happening

Self-media blogger Snail and the team turned workflows such as topic selection, scripting, and cover creation into "Blogger Farm," attracting more than 1,000 registered users and more than 300 bloggers, yet for a long time there were no paying users.

To give the product payment and collection capabilities, the team tried many methods and struggled for 159 days. It was not until they discovered "AiCha Collect," launched by Alipay AI Pay and Guanzha, that the team reached a turning point: they got a guide "written for AI to read," handed it to Codex to write code, completed integration and went live in 73 minutes, and soon received 10 orders, with points automatically credited and no manual processing needed.

Behind zero payments, there was also a cumbersome payment threshold. Crossing this threshold, Snail also saw another possibility of turning work experience into a product. He said: "Bloggers have a life cycle; they may stop being popular in three to five years. But a product can also generate income while I sleep.

" Similar attempts have also happened in other products. The image-text generation tool "Redink" received 9 orders, with transaction amounts exceeding 1,282 yuan; developer Canghe explored charging mechanisms around products such as CodexGuide and GPT-Image2, accumulating more than 500 real orders.

These attempts make a new round of entrepreneurial opportunities concrete, and this is also the invitation issued by this hackathon: bring the project you are developing, validate demand, try charging, and strive for your first order. In this wave of AI entrepreneurship, take the first step from your creativity to a business.