Hackyard

Hackyard runs small, capped hackathons called Yards — 20 to 50 solo builders, one theme, one weekend, free. Most hackathons ask you to trust the process. Hackyard publishes it. Every submission shows its repo timing pulled live from GitHub, so "built during the window" is checkable rather than claimed. Every build names the AI model it used. And where a rule can't actually be enforced, the site says so plainly instead of pretending. There's no judging panel and no organizer override. One vote per person, final, counts hidden until close, and submission order reshuffles on every load so nobody wins by being first. The top vote-getter is crowned automatically. Yard #1's theme is "No accounts." Open-model — bring whatever AI you use.

I kept trying to get into hackathons and kept hitting a wall. Most of the good ones are run by universities, and you have to be enrolled to enter. I'm not a student. That ruled out most of them before I finished reading the page. The rest wanted me to fly across the country and sleep on a floor for a weekend. I wasn't doing that either. So I looked at online hackathons, and nearly all of them had a catch — an entry fee, a subscription to some sponsor's platform, a mandatory signup for a tool I'd never open again, or a prize structure that only made sense if you were already an agency with a team. None of it was hostile. It was just built for someone who wasn't me. A student, a funded team, someone with a travel budget. What clicked was realizing the barrier was never the hackathon itself. Forty- eight hours and a theme cost nothing. Everything expensive about it had been bolted on afterward. So I built Hackyard. 50 solo builders, one theme, one weekend, free — and free with no catch. No entry fee, no sponsor signup, no required tool, no tier you have to buy. You claim a spot, you build, you ship, and the community votes. No panel deciding whose face fits. What made me actually ship it was watching the spots fill. Half the yard was claimed before the first event even had a date on the calendar. Turns out I wasn't the only one who'd been locked out.