Competitions should work for everyone.
The architecture competition industry is broken. Designers pay to enter, prize payouts are unverifiable, and the value flows the wrong way. We're fixing that.
The Problem
Designers pay to submit
Entry fees of $40-100+ are standard. Multiply by hundreds of entries and organizers often collect more in fees than they pay in prizes.
Prizes are unverifiable
Did the winner get paid? When? The full amount? There's no public proof. Organizers self-report and the community has to trust them.
Quality is inconsistent
Anyone can call something a 'competition.' There's no framework ensuring clear briefs, fair judging, or professional standards.
IP rights are buried
Many competitions quietly claim broad rights over all submissions. Designers hand over months of work without realizing they've signed away their rights.
Good organizers can't prove it
A legitimate institution running a fair competition looks identical, from the outside, to a fee-farming scheme — there's no way to signal you're different. That costs you the highest-caliber submissions.
Running one well is hard
Anonymous jury tracking, public Q&A, prize pool verification, payout proof — most organizers assemble this from email threads and PDFs, and it shows.
Our Principles
Free to submit, always
No entry fees, ever. If a competition is on our platform, it's free to enter. Period.
Free to create
No listing fees. The only requirement is funding a prize pool (minimum $100). If you cancel, 50% of the prize pool goes to registered designers and 50% is returned to you. Open pool competitions cannot be cancelled at all.
Transparent prize pools
Every competition shows its prize pool in real time — total amount, breakdown by place, funding status, and payout verification.
Prize money is locked in escrow
Once funded, the prize pool cannot be withdrawn or clawed back by the organizer. The money stays for the competition — designers can trust it's real before they invest their time, and organizers can't be accused of walking away with it, because they never could.
Designers own their work
The default IP terms protect designers. No blanket rights grabs. Aggressive terms get visible warnings so designers can make informed decisions.
Anonymous judging, enforced by the platform
Submitter identities are hidden from the jury until winners are announced — not just promised in the brief, but enforced at the database level. The organizer cannot see who submitted what until they hit announce. This follows the UIA Accord on Competitions, eliminates one of the most common sources of unfairness in the industry, and protects organizers and jurors too — no one can accuse a decision of favoritism when it wasn't possible in the first place.
5% on every distribution — always transparent
We take a flat 5% on every fund flow: prize payouts, cancellation splits, and lapsed-deadline distributions. No hidden fees, no exceptions. You always see exactly what goes where before anything moves.
Designers are protected from inaction
After a competition closes, organizers and jurors have 30 days to select a winner. If that window passes with no decision, anyone can trigger an equal distribution of the full prize pool to all registered designers.
Organizers build a reputation that travels
Every payout is on-chain and verifiable. A track record of funding real prizes and running fair judging becomes something you can point to — it attracts bigger pools and better talent next time, instead of starting from zero.
Competitions are beginnings
Every competition has a living timeline. Did it get built? What happened next? We follow the story from brief to built.
Open Prize Pools
Some competitions address challenges that matter to everyone — public housing, climate resilience, civic spaces. For these competitions, anyone can contribute to the prize fund.
Bigger pools attract more and better submissions. Contributors see the real-world impact of their funding. It's a virtuous cycle.
The Transparency Promise
Every competition page shows exactly where the money goes.