Four of the six student events we verified this month advertise prize totals that are mostly not cash. One has no cash at all despite having six figures in its title. This is not fraud and it is not unusual — platform hackathons give away software subscriptions because that is cheap for sponsors and useful to students — but the advertised number and the money are different quantities, and they are routinely reported as if they were the same.
The practical case: ForgeHacks advertises $672,570 in prizes, and its own prize breakdown lists $100 cash for first place, with the remainder as sponsor credits, memberships and gift cards. DSH Hacks V2 has no cash prize pool at all despite “$100k+” in its name. Neither is dishonest. Both are easy to quote wrongly, and both cost a student real time if discovered after committing a weekend.
What the four figures actually mean
| Event | Advertised | Actual cash |
|---|---|---|
| ForgeHacks | $672,570 | $100 for first place; the rest is credits, memberships, gift cards |
| Hackyard Build | ₹4,47,500 | ₹47,500 main-event cash; remainder is per-project support and credits |
| DSH Hacks V2 | “$100k+” in the title | None. Five non-cash prizes plus a 50% scholarship for a research fellowship |
| Bridge The Gap | — | $0 cash, and judging criteria were still listed as forthcoming |
How to check in about two minutes
Open the event’s Prizes tab and read the breakdown rather than the headline. On Devpost, non-cash items are listed separately from currency amounts, so the shape of the list tells you the answer before you read a word of it.
- Is there a currency symbol next to any amount? Devpost shows cash as a number with a currency marker. “Credits”, “membership”, “gift card”, “voucher” and “swag” are not cash.
- Does the top prize dominate? If first place is three figures and second is a subscription, the headline total is summing unlike things.
- Is the advertised total larger than the sum of the listed prizes? Sometimes the headline includes an “estimated total value of all prizes” that includes non-cash items. That wording is the tell.
- Is the prize pool stated as cash anywhere? If not, assume it is not cash until proven otherwise.
- Check whether prizes are per-team or per-member. A $1,000 team prize split four ways is $250 each, and international teams have people in several tax jurisdictions.
Non-cash is not automatically worthless
It would be easy to read the above as “avoid anything without cash”, and that would be wrong. Some non-cash prizes are worth more than a small cash prize, depending on what you were going to spend anyway.
| Prize type | Worth it when |
|---|---|
| Cloud credits (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) | You needed to buy them anyway. A $200 credit is a genuine $200 saving |
| Paid internship or fellowship | Almost always. Outreachy pays USD 7,000 for a four-month remote stint — that is a cash-equivalent award by any reasonable measure |
| Scholarship or tuition credit | You were going to pay that tuition anyway |
| Tool subscriptions (JetBrains, GitHub Copilot, Figma, Notion) | You would have paid for them, and you will need them after the event |
| Gift cards | Almost never, relative to the headline figure. Treat at face value |
| Hardware and swag | Only if you genuinely wanted the object |
DSH Hacks V2 is the interesting case. It has no cash, but it includes a 50% scholarship for a research fellowship, which for the right person is worth considerably more than a small cash prize. That is a legitimate event. It simply is not what “$100k+” suggests.
The comparison that matters
When you are choosing between events, the useful comparison is not headline against headline. It is:
- What you keep — cash actually received, after any split across a team
- What it costs — the weekend, any travel, and whether the event is online
- What you can show afterwards — the repository, the demo, the write-up. For a student without a job yet, this is usually the largest component of the return
- Who else is there — the people you meet are usually worth more than the prize
On that basis, a $0-cash event that is fully online, where you will ship something real in front of people who will look at it, frequently beats a $180 in-person event three time zones away. It is worth doing the arithmetic before you are disappointed.
Why sponsors do this
Worth understanding so you do not read malice into it. A cloud credit costs the sponsor far less than cash at the same nominal value, because credits only pay out if you would have spent money on that platform anyway, and they bring you into their ecosystem. It is a marketing budget line, not a prize budget. Platforms like Devpost make the distinction visible on purpose, because they get asked about it constantly.
The failure is not on the sponsor’s side. It is in the retelling — a student posts a screenshot of the headline, an aggregator writes it up as a cash prize, and by the time it reaches a Discord server the money has multiplied by a hundred. Verify at the source, which is always one click away.
What DevStackIO does
On every event we publish, we report the cash figure separately from the advertised total, and we say “not published” rather than estimating. Where a prize is not cash, we write that. Where a deadline is not on the organiser’s site, we say the deadline is not published instead of repeating a date from an aggregator. It makes our pages less quotable and more useful, which is the trade we want.
If you spot a prize figure somewhere that does not survive this test, treat it as unverified until you have read the organiser’s own breakdown. The round-up of events open now carries these figures with the cash amount called out separately for each.
Related Tools
Try these companion tools on DevStackIO Tools:
- discount calculator — compute prize splits and effective discount percentages for hackathon awards.
