> Why participate in a contest when I can just get $100k from them by writing an application?

Because that grant comes with obligations and strings attached (which you gotta deal with, after your application gets approved and the grant hits your bank account). The whole idea behind grants like this is that you use it to start up a real company, and the grant-giver gets to be one of the first early investors in it (in case of success). With this in mind, most of the work on your project is also expected to happen after you obtain the grant.

Hackathon winnings are supposed to be the exact opposite[0]. You do the work on your prototype on your own, you present, you win the prize with no strings attached, and that’s it. You aren’t expected to continue working on it after the hackathon as a condition to receive the prize (but you can of course, and you might even get encouragement and support from the sponsors/other entities at the event to do so).

On a related massive side-tangent: I was sorely disappointed in hackathons back in college after going to a few major and local ones. Winners half the time didn’t have any even barely functional prototype and would gather wins off of powerpoints alone, half of them with proposals that wouldn’t even be feasible or possible to implement at all.

A specific example that pissed me off at the time: the 2nd place winner at one of the Atlanta college hackathons I attended around 2014 was a team of 6 people with only a couple of devs. Their opening statement was like this: “none of us had any machine learning experience or knowledge until yesterday, but we learned it all in one day and decided to build an app that will tell you the full nutritional content of any dish you take a photo of, based on the food components in it.” First, I don’t think it is technically feasible to accomplish even in 2024. Second, claiming to have zero knowledge of machine learning and figuring it all out in one single day to the point of building a functional model that was beyond any cutting-edge research at the time was sussy. So naturally, I was excited to see what their prototype was. Turns out, there was no prototype and no code at all (which they easily admitted), just a powerpoint deck. Judges all fawned over it, and they won one of those “we are a startup accelerator and we would like to give you a grant to work on it afterwards to turn it into a real company, the grant is pre-approved and is waiting for you (if you are ready to commit)” sponsor grants.

However, there was one time where I remembered the winners vividly (and the hackathon overall, as it was one of the very few that I would consider “proper”), because I was genuinely impressed by what they built, and felt it was very well deserved. I tried to keep up with what they were up to, as they continued working on that project in the open after the hackathon, and I am so happy I did.

Spoiler: that team was the one that built WorkFlow[1]. Shortly afterwards, they actually released it in the App Store, and it kept growing over the years. It culminated into the team continuing to work on it full-time after graduating and getting acquired by Apple to build the improved native version of that, which is currently known as Apple Shortcuts. Which is an amazing tool I use all the time, and I am a bit surprised by how little discourse there has been about it in tech circles. Especially since it is clearly not abandonware, as Apple eventually expanded Shortcuts from iPhone to iPadOS and macOS, and it keeps being integrated into newer things Apple releases as well (like Home automation and plenty others).

0. Note: I am aware that a lot of hackathons now have similar type of “prizes” from some sponsors, where they give you a tiny (or often non-existent) cash prize and then offer to fast-track/pre-approve your grant application as a component of it.

1. https://www.michigandaily.com/uncategorized/mhacks-winners-p...