Hackathon Economics: Nearly 500 Events in China in the First Half of 2026, Costs Ranging from 20,000 to 1.2 Million Yuan

[[**In the first half of 2026, nearly 500 hackathons were held in China; the lowered AI barrier has led to uneven participant skill levels; event costs range from 20,000 to 1.2 million yuan, and the essence is a resource-exchange platform where government, enterprises, and students each get what they need, with organizers finding it hard to profit directly and instead earning through derived trust and toB/toG business.**

**Key Points**

**1. Hackathons have exploded in scale, with participants' technical levels polarized**

In the first half of 2026, nearly 500 hackathons were held nationwide, averaging 2-3 per day. The development of AI Coding has lowered the programming barrier, but there have been cases of participants not even knowing what GitHub is, indicating that the participant group has expanded from professional developers to a broader population.

**2. Costs range from 20,000 to 1.2 million yuan, with hard costs and experience investment determining the scale**

The lowest cost of 20,000 yuan is achieved through idle government venues, student volunteers, and resource exchanges; the highest at 1.2 million yuan includes four-star hotel accommodation, large cash prizes, and rental of large venues. The only rigid, non-compressible expenses are prizes, materials, and labor; the rest can be compressed through negotiation or exchange.

**3. Corporate participation motives: recruitment and product promotion, with cash sponsorship scarce**

Corporate sponsorship of hackathons is mainly aimed at human resources and product marketing departments, such as Insta360 and Intel directly providing products or resource exchanges; fewer than 10% of companies are willing to provide cash sponsorship, and more companies choose to hold their own hackathons, such as ByteDance and Tencent.

**4. Government funding logic: talent attraction and industry building, but there is a mismatch between procedures and vitality**

Government departments (Youth League committees, science and technology bureaus, human resources and social security bureaus) each fund according to their own demands, with amounts ranging from a few thousand to several hundred thousand yuan. The creative vitality of hackathons may conflict with the standardized operations of government, and organizers need to balance resource acquisition with event attractiveness.

**5. Hackathons are not directly profitable, but they generate a trust premium and toB/toG business models**

Domestic hackathon prizes are generally low and cannot support participants. Organizers gain industry trust through the "founder" identity, or turn to hosting themed hackathons for enterprises (e.g., a textile factory offering 200,000 yuan), or cooperate with the government on workshops to generate income; the essence is a resource-exchange platform rather than a pure cash-flow business. 2026-10-09 12:09 Hackathon "Economics" Mirror Studio Quick Overview

In the morning, the conference hall was full. The front-row seats were reserved for leaders, while in the back rows sat young people who had come from all over, carrying laptops and holding hardware. The host read out a name; a leader in the audience stood up, took the microphone, and began to speak.

The young contestants yawned. The conference hall was not their main stage; what they really wanted was to go to the competition venue on the other side. There, tables had already been set up row by row and power outlets laid out. Sponsors' booths were also set up. On the tables were stacks of campus recruitment brochures, next to roll-up banners promoting products.

This is a hackathon—a group of people gathering together to turn an idea into a runnable demo within a few dozen hours. When such events are held in various places, they are often given local names: in Nanjing it is called "Nankesong," in Guiyang "Guikesong"; the names differ, but the format is much the same.

Scenes like this play out in cities across China almost every weekend. In 2025, hackathons were still a relatively niche game among developers and the AI venture capital circle. But by 2026, with the development of AI Coding capabilities and Vibe Coding becoming mainstream, the programming barrier has been lowered, and the barrier to hackathons has fallen accordingly. According to data from the community "AI Saishi Tong," in the first half of 2026, nearly 500 hackathons were held across China, averaging 2-3 per day.

Chen Rongxian, who has organized multiple hackathons, witnessed a surprising and intriguing scene: once, when he went to a hackathon site, he found that some contestants did not even know what GitHub (the world's largest code hosting and collaborative development platform) was.

Behind the bustle is this logic of putting together a game: the government wants talent and industry, enterprises want people and exposure, students want credentials and opportunities, and organizers want cash flow... Hackathons are young and lively; they do not make money themselves, but they have become a traffic entry point and a venue for resource exchange.

When everyone wants to take something away from this scene, who is actually paying for it?

From 20,000 to 1.2 million: a hundred ways hackathons are "stingy" and "extravagant"

There is no standard answer to how much it costs to hold a hackathon.

The most "plain" hackathon Yang Peijun has seen cost even less than 20,000 yuan; when Chen Rongxian first organized "Nankesong," the 50,000 yuan government sponsorship was all the available funding; a year later, the second "Nankesong," also organized by Chen Rongxian, saw costs soar to 600,000-700,000 yuan; not long ago, "Guikesong," which Mandy co-organized, originally aimed to keep costs around 500,000 yuan but ended up spending 1.2 million yuan.

From 20,000 to 1.2 million, where does the difference lie?

Breaking down a hackathon, the money is mainly spent on several areas: venue setup, prizes and awards, contestant accommodation and travel, catering and coffee breaks, material design, staff labor, and various on-site emergency expenses. Some are "hard costs" that cannot be avoided no matter what, while others depend on the scale the organizer wants the event to reach.

This year, Yang Peijun organized a Douyin hackathon in Ningbo, spending about 100,000 yuan over two days and one night. In his view, the only truly rigid, non-compressible costs are prizes, materials, and labor, "things that really have to be given out and bought"; everything else can be figured out somehow.

You don’t necessarily have to rent a venue—“actually, the government has a lot of idle venues; if you talk to them, you can wear them down.” For a hackathon of 100 people, Yang Peijun and his team needed a venue of about 1,000 square meters, and it also had to have equipment such as a large screen; in all of Ningbo, there were only two or three suitable venues. So they visited each one and negotiated with the corresponding park operators and the government departments above them.

Many organizers of low-cost hackathons are student teams, or they use a large number of volunteers, so labor costs nothing; for tea breaks and drinks, they can seek resource swaps with brands; if they can’t afford to give out cash prizes, they can also ask brands for some products to use as prizes. When organizing the first “Nanke Song,” because the budget was only about 50,000 yuan, Chen Rongxian and the team took out a few thousand yuan from it as prize money and used some “benefits” to expand the prize pool, such as a direct-pass card to AdventureX, then billed as “China’s largest hackathon.”

“There will also be many temporary emergency expenses at the event site; count that as the fourth hard cost.” One situation Yang Peijun encountered was that the network was too slow, so he and his team ran power lines and network cables to the venue late at night, worked until 3 a.m., and spent 2,000 yuan. The tents originally prepared for contestants staying up all night to code ended up being slept in by themselves.

As for computing power tokens, they usually come from sponsorship by model vendors. In addition, MaaS companies that sell computing power are also a main force in sponsoring computing power for hackathons.

They also have some of their own “stingy” tricks: they wanted to hold a pre-party at a craft beer bar near the school, but could not afford to buy out all the drinks, so Chen Rongxian told the owner that each person entering would pay for one drink themselves. When hiring a designer for materials, the total package price was 20,000 yuan, but producing the key visual was 3,000, “so at that point you can have the designer produce the key visual and then solve the rest yourselves,” Yang Peijun said.

Since a hackathon can be held for tens of thousands of yuan, where did the more than one million yuan go?

Precisely because hackathons have no unified standard configuration, a large part of the price gap is paying for the event’s specifications and experience. The higher the specifications, the more costs stack up layer by layer. At a cost of 50,000, the organizer is thinking about whether it can be held at all. At a cost of 1.2 million, the organizer is thinking about how to hold it well and on a large scale.

The number of participants depends on the desired scale; as the number increases, the corresponding material costs increase; prize money affects the appeal to contestants, and how much is given depends on what kind of contestants the organizer wants to attract; contestant travel and hotels are not mandatory, and how much is reimbursed and how reimbursement is handled depend on what kind of experience the event wants to provide.

At the second “Nanke Song,” because they secured more sponsorship and subsidies, Chen Rongxian’s team covered everything and provided more than 100 contestants with two to three nights of four-star hotel accommodation. The competition fell during the May Day holiday, and this item alone cost more than 100,000 yuan. The event was held at the Nanjing International Expo Center, and the venue plus the large screen cost another 50,000 yuan. Prizes and awards together were worth more than 200,000 to 300,000 yuan.

Another example is the “Guike Song” in which Mandy participated. The organizer was a state-owned enterprise in Guizhou, which provided money and resources. “Because of its support, a lot was indeed invested, hoping to provide better support and services for the contestants,” Mandy said. At first they only wanted to hold a small-scale event to test the waters, but later the event received more attention, and the scale and specifications grew larger and larger.

First they brought in a building materials team to design the venue and carved out nearly 2,000 square meters of event space at the “Big Data Expo”; the number of contestants was set at 300, which was not a small number either; in order to attract contestants from all over the country to Guizhou, they also covered accommodation and meals for 300 contestants; and they put up 150,000 yuan in cash as prize money.

From 20,000 to 1.2 million, behind the span is the same question: who exactly pays for this event, and for whom. Those who cut costs to the extreme are using resource swaps to replace cash; those who spend up to 1.2 million are using cash to pile up specifications. And the higher the specifications, the more it requires the government or large companies to pay.

The money and resources needed to hold a hackathon mainly flow from two directions: government subsidies and corporate sponsorship. Why they are willing to pay for such an event is a question worth continuing to ask.

What companies want

For companies, a hackathon is not simply “sponsoring an event.” An important reason they are willing to invest money, products, and manpower is that the people gathered at the hackathon site are exactly the people they want to reach.

In June 2025, in order to create an opportunity to introduce his hackathon face to face to Insta360 Innovation founder Liu Jingkang, Chen Rongxian blocked him at the restroom entrance.

That day Liu Jingkang returned to his alma mater for an event. Taking advantage of the interval when Liu Jingkang left the venue to go to the restroom, Chen Rongxian also rushed over. Liu Jingkang was startled, and the two then walked from the restroom toward the venue. In just a few dozen meters, Chen Rongxian quickly explained the idea of the hackathon and asked him to come to the site to support it.

After the meeting, seeing that the man was about to leave, Chen Rongxian’s friend pulled him and rushed forward again, breaking through the “layers of encirclement” of school leaders and forcibly stuffing the paper materials into Liu Jingkang’s hands. Later, Insta360 sponsored some products for “Nanke Song,” and Liu Jingkang himself also recorded a promotional video for it.

The methods were unconventional and not bound by convention, but they would not stop until the goal was achieved. In 2024 and 2025, when AI hackathons had just begun to revive in China, there were many things like this. Almost every organizer knew how AdventureX “pulled itself up by its own bootstraps” to find money when it was founded—if you wanted to cooperate with one internet company, you had to tell it that cooperation with another internet company was already close to being finalized. Conversely, you could say the same thing to the latter company.

But encouragement from individual companies alone is not sustainable. After coming into contact with more companies, Chen Rongxian gradually understood the two departments to focus on when approaching companies:

First, the human resources department. The people gathered at hackathons are already actually building products and solving problems, and they hope to recruit high-quality people at the events. At different hackathon venues, corporate campus recruitment brochures and roll-up banners are often seen.

Second, the product marketing department. They have needs for product and brand promotion, and the young people at hackathons are very likely their target users.

What companies want is not just people and exposure. When Intel was the chief sponsor of the Tmall AI Hackathon, its stated reason was that the competition could combine AI computing power with real consumer scenarios and let students test their technical abilities against real needs. In L’Oréal’s beauty tech hackathon, the winning team can directly enter the management trainee or summer intern program. For companies, a hackathon is both a recruiting pool and a venue for developers to “put things to use.”

A hardware manufacturer’s booth at a hackathon. Photo: Lin De’an

Mandy joined the “Guike Song” team midway as the person responsible for business development. Her approach was to attend a large number of other hackathons and events on the market at the time and meet brands there. She chatted one by one with every vendor that had a booth at AdventureX, “because since they had already sponsored one hackathon, that showed they had this kind of need.” Insta360, for example, was one she secured by waiting around at AdventureX.

Companies sponsor hackathons with money and products; correspondingly, hackathon organizers divide sponsors into different tiers according to the amount sponsored and provide different benefits. Taking “Guike Song” as an example, 80,000 yuan makes one a strategic partner, and 50,000 yuan a core partner. Both include the benefits of an event booth and an official media interview, except that strategic partners get a larger booth in a more forward position. “Because it is in the same venue and at the same time as the Big Data Expo, the booths we provide would sell for more than 1,000 yuan per square meter if sold separately outside,” Mandy said.

But more common than money is the exchange of products and resources. In one month, Mandy reached out to more than 90 companies; fewer than 10 were willing to put up 40,000 to 80,000 yuan in cash, which was already a lot among similar hackathons.

“Very few are willing to pay cash. There are too many hackathons now, and sponsors are already very fatigued. Moreover, the companies willing to sponsor hackathons are probably also organizing hackathons themselves,” Mandy said.

This is indeed another way companies participate in hackathons: rather than sponsoring someone else’s hackathon, it is better to hold their own.

The hackathon Yang Peijun organized in Ningbo was as a contractor for Douyin. At the time, he had founded two AI venture capital-related communities in Ningbo. When Douyin held hackathons in various places, at the municipal level it generally looked for more local teams to organize them. Douyin provided a sum of funding for municipal- and school-level events, as well as pay for this student team roughly equivalent to that of an event operations intern in a quasi-first-tier city.

More and more companies are entering the field to run hackathons themselves. In addition to tech giants such as ByteDance, Tencent, and Amazon, there are also hardware companies such as Insta360 and communities such as Xiaohongshu and Zhihu.

What does the government want?

Compared with companies’ exchange of products and resources, government money is often more direct, but the application and coordination process is also more complicated.

When organizing a hackathon for the first time last year, Chen Rongxian and the team were just a group of students with no money, no traffic, and not much in the way of connections. The first lever they found to move things forward was the government.

He heard that a senior schoolmate was teaching an entrepreneurship and innovation course at the school and was very supportive of student work. Although he did not know the person and had not taken the course, he still rushed into the classroom and pulled the person aside to ask: “We want to do something like this—is there any way you can support us?” The person introduced him to a government department, which provided 50,000 yuan in sponsorship, and the event was thus made possible.

More often, however, government money is not pulled out all at once by a single department. This year Luo Yu got a hackathon off the ground, and he felt this especially deeply.

To hold one hackathon, he had already lost count of how many offices he had run to and how many leaders he had met face to face. At first, he approached the Communist Youth League department focused on the youth ecosystem, and the Youth League provided 25,000 yuan as prize money.

The Youth League could not provide more money either. So it introduced him to different departments such as the science and technology bureau and the human resources and social security bureau. These two departments provided 10,000 yuan and 20,000 yuan respectively. He thought about where else he could find money, went to the subdistrict office, and got another 26,000 yuan.

One of the leaders then introduced them to a local state-owned bank, which provided 9,000 yuan, but with one condition: the money could only be used to issue meal vouchers. In this way, the event budget was pieced together bit by bit from different people and different departments.

Different departments are willing to pay for different reasons: the Youth League focuses on the youth ecosystem, the science and technology bureau on technological innovation, the human resources and social security department on talent, and the subdistrict may focus on local activities. Organizers need to understand what different departments really care about and then connect their projects to those demands.

The key to negotiation is to let the relevant departments see that a hackathon is not just a small-scale student lark, but a project that can carry local demands. The first “Nanke Song” became somewhat well known locally, and it became much easier for Chen Rongxian to find money. Different district governments even began to “compete” for this hackathon project and brand, and one district government provided nearly 500,000 yuan in sponsorship.

“Their demands are, first, to develop innovation and entrepreneurship communities such as OPC (one-person companies), and second, ‘Nanke Song’ is already an influential brand, and they hope to bring our brand in. The logic is still ‘building a highland for innovation and entrepreneurship.’”

But hackathons champion the vitality and creativity of young people, while government operations emphasize procedures and norms. At certain moments, these two logics may come into a subtle misalignment.

Luo Yu deliberately discussed it with the leadership, hoping the speech segment would not be too formal—for example, young people do not like things like taking turns to speak. The leader said okay. But immediately after, the leader asked, then can we go on stage to present awards? In the end, they decided that in the last hour of the park roadshow day, the leaders would be invited in to visit.

Without local government departments providing venues, funding, and coordinating resources, many hackathons would be very difficult to pull off. But excessive participation by the latter also reduces the appeal of the event. Hackathon organizers can only weigh the balance between the two.

How did hackathons become a business that does not make money?

Money is hard to get from both sides, so do hackathons actually make money?

“If running hackathons in China really made money, I guarantee a bunch of people would copy it the next day. If I didn’t, I’d go copy it.” Henry said half-jokingly.

In his view, participating in hackathons is far more profitable than organizing them. As a long-term participant, he once won more than $50,000 in prize money in a single year. “Before 2025 I was abroad, and basically I could avoid starting a business or having a job and just support myself by doing hackathons. Because there really are too many hackathons.”

But hackathons in China, first of all, do not offer much prize money. The first hackathon he did in the United States was an online competition with a total prize pool of $1 million. In China, the top-tier AdventureX has a total prize pool of 1 million RMB. For a hackathon with 800 to 1,000 people, that prize money is not generous. “For example, last year we did AdventureX and only got 10,000 RMB.” Prize money from Chinese hackathons cannot support a person.

Many contestants are willing to participate in order to buff their resumes. In Henry’s view, “Hackathons give everyone a chance to show themselves, just like Zhihu treats hackathons as campus recruitment and the Zhongguancun Artificial Intelligence Academy treats hackathons as a doctoral qualification exam.”

Contestants cannot make money, and organizers do not rely on this to make money either. When organizing the second “Nanke Song,” although they brought in a lot of sponsorship, spending also became lavish, and at one point it got out of hand—Chen Rongxian even put in some of his own money.

As the event neared its end, he deliberately reined it in a bit. “We can’t end up with nothing left, can we? We still have to give everyone some labor fees.” After subtracting costs from the sponsorship, the remaining money and prizes were split evenly among a small team of 7 or 8 people, and each person received labor fees and prizes worth a few tens of thousands of RMB.

But when Chen Rongxian calculated the input and output, he felt it was not worth it. “We all studied technology. From our background, doing this has too low a return on investment. Going into an algorithm position starts at 700,000.”

What organizers earn is not labor fees, but the trust premium brought by the identity of “founder.” Now Chen Rongxian has started an FDE company. When going out to negotiate business, as long as he says he is the founder of Nanke Song, the other party immediately knows. After doing “Guike Song,” Mandy at least gained the endorsement of “head of BD for Guike Song, with team members connecting with 90+ enterprises in a month.”

“I think it is very difficult for hackathons to be profitable. It must be based on hackathons plus something else, using hackathons as a lever to pry it open, so that something that was originally profitable later becomes even more profitable,” Chen Rongxian said.

Abroad, Henry has seen many such examples. On the one hand, there are a large number of startups abroad that provide tools for developers. In a mature developer ecosystem, hackathons are a low-cost customer acquisition method for startups targeting developers. “The ROI of online traffic may go negative, but if you build community, first, the traffic is very precise; second, users will trust you, because through the hackathon they see that the project side is made of living people; third, because your users are using tools to make money, so if you promote to 1,000 users and only one of them takes off, you make money along with them.”

On the other hand, the hackathon format is naturally highly connected to the venture capital ecosystem. He has seen many hackathons held directly in VC offices, and hackathon organizers themselves can also be VCs, directly investing in projects on site. Even developers invest in each other’s projects. “In an environment with good capital liquidity and a mature developer ecosystem, even if a hackathon does not make money, it is making money (generating returns),” Henry said.

But because of differences in capital and the developer environment, it is hard to say either of these two approaches works in China.

The only hackathon in China that could be called “profitable” is perhaps AdventureX, which began in 2024. This year a medium-sized exhibition booth costs about 200,000 RMB. Because the quality of contestants is “arguably the highest in China,” one of AdventureX’s commercialization methods is selling contestants’ contact information and other details, but this has also plunged AdventureX deep into controversy.

However, hackathons in China have developed their own path, and now it looks more like a toB or toG business.

After holding a hackathon, a textile factory approached Luo Yu and offered 200,000 RMB, hoping to hold one for the textile factory as well.

Luo Yu was a bit unsure whether to laugh or cry. “In the logic of enterprises, if it were about pulling sponsorship, they might not even be willing to pay 20,000. But if you organize a hackathon around it, they will see it as a major signal of transformation, from a traditional textile factory into a high-tech enterprise, so they can pay 200,000.”

At present, there are two common commercialization paths for hackathons. One is to hold themed hackathons for enterprises, and the other is to cooperate with the government—for example, cooperating with the government to hold workshops, where government subsidies minus necessary event expenses become income.

Becoming more down-to-earth and moving toward second- and third-tier cities is also a trend they have all observed. The hackathon brand “Qu Tansuo” even has a “Hundred Cities, Thousand Counties” plan.

On one side, young people stay up late running code and revising demos; on the other, what is being discussed may be investment promotion, talent, and industrial transformation. From this perspective, the liveliness of hackathons in China today is due to the AI wave, and also related to industrial mobilization.

This is a business that is not yet fully mature. It is like a temporarily assembled market: some departments contribute venues and funding and take away political achievements and talent and industry demands; enterprises bring in products and resources and take away product exposure and user growth; young people bring in time and ideas and take away opportunities and ability endorsements. Everyone gets what they need, and no one can fully control what this transaction will ultimately produce.

(Luo Yu is a pseudonym) Channel: Business and Consumer. This content is authorized by the author for publication. The views represent only the author and do not represent the position of Huxiu. If you have objections or complaints about this article, please contact tougao@huxiu.com. Everyone who is changing and wants to change the world is on the Huxiu APP[ ]]]