Twelve weeks to build one app that helps people handle their money — a budget, an insurance calculator, a portfolio tracker, whatever you'd want yourself. You don't need to know how to code. Open to Kentucky college students and anyone who graduated in the last three years.
Tell me when it opens Start with one sentenceYou will make a single web page by describing it to an AI assistant in plain English. The assistant writes the code. Your job — the hard, valuable part, and the part the judges are looking at — is knowing how to help people with the tool they need.
Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever you use, and ask for what you want in one sentence. Nothing to install and nothing to pay.
build a single-file web app that works out how much life insurance a family needs
Save what comes back as a .html
file and double-click it. Try a case where you already know the answer. Wrong? Tell the
assistant what happened in plain words and it'll fix it.
That back-and-forth is the normal way of doing this, not a sign you've gone wrong.
Put it in Globefin's Demos gallery under your own name and licence, then send us the link through the form on this page. That's the entry.
Never made anything before? That's the expected starting point, not a disadvantage. Try a hello world first — ten minutes, nobody reviews it, nothing is compared to anything — and you'll know whether this is for you before you commit twelve weeks.
Pick what you're making and who it's for. We'll assemble a starting prompt that already carries the challenge requirements, so your first attempt comes back in the right shape. Copy it, paste it into any AI assistant, and you have something running in ten minutes.
Be specific. A tool built for somebody in particular beats a tool built for everybody.
Calling an outside service for a rate or a price is allowed. The prompt will add the rules that come with it — chiefly that it still has to work when the service doesn't.
This is a starting point, not a spec. The tools that win are the ones somebody kept working on after the first answer came back. The full brief, with everything we check for, is at globefin.org/webapp-requirements.
One wide category, judged on one question: does this do a real job properly for the person who needs it? A single sharp calculator can beat a sprawling planner, and usually does.
The easiest way to stand out is to build something nobody has built yet. Globefin keeps a shelf of Basics — the one app we point everyone at for a given job. Where there's no app at all for a job, there's no incumbent to beat.
Every entry is screened against this before any sponsor sees it. Nothing here is a surprise on the day, and the prompt builder above already asks for most of it.
Your app may call an outside service to look something up — today's rates, a share price, a tax table. That's often the difference between a toy and a tool, so it's allowed. Four conditions come with it:
The reason for the second one: people will type real numbers into a financial tool from someone they've never heard of only if those numbers demonstrably go nowhere. That trust is the thing Globefin is built on, and it's the first thing screening checks.
Using an AI assistant to write the code is expected and fine. Submitting an app somebody else built and published is not.
The prize pool is funded by Kentucky advisory firms, banks and broker-dealers, and split three ways. It's being raised now; the percentages below are fixed, and the dollar figures firm up as sponsors commit.
The top five entrants get a guaranteed first-round interview with a sponsoring Kentucky firm — an RIA, a bank, or a broker-dealer. One conversation, at a time the firm chooses, within ninety days of the announcement.
Being straight with you about the limits: it's not an offer, not a promise of a second round, and not a commitment from a firm that isn't in a position to employ you. It's a door that is otherwise very hard to open at this stage, opened.
For each job there's one app Globefin points every visitor to, worldwide. That's a Basic. Every entry is considered, whether or not it places.
If yours is chosen it stays yours — your name, your licence, your page. It just becomes the one we hand to everybody.
Prizes of $600 or more require a completed W-9 and are reported on Form 1099-MISC. Teams of up to 3 may enter together and split a single prize; for the interviews, team members are considered individually.
Two stages, so nobody's app is dismissed on a technicality nobody told you about, and nobody wins on presentation alone.
Globefin staff check eligibility, the single-file rules, accessibility, and the arithmetic against worked examples. If your app calls an API we test it with the network cut. You're told what failed, in writing.
Finalists record a two-minute walkthrough explaining what the tool does and the decisions behind it. Talking through your own work is the whole test.
Sponsoring firms rank their top three. Votes are weighted by contribution and capped, so no single firm decides it. The tally is published.
Prizes paid, interviews scheduled within ninety days, and every entry stays up under your name for as long as you want it there.
What sponsors are told to look for: that it does the job properly for somebody who needs it, rather than convincingly in a demo; that it handles the hard case; that the arithmetic is right; and that the source is readable. Polish helps, but it doesn't win on its own.
Submissions open September 15, 2026. Register now and we'll email you when they do, along with the final rules and the confirmed prize pool. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Nothing. No entry fee, no account required to build, no software to buy. The AI assistants that write the code have free tiers that are more than enough for this.
Your app. Publishing puts it under an open licence with your name on it so others can learn from it, and you can take it down whenever you like. Winning doesn't transfer anything to us or to the sponsors.
Submit it anyway. Small and finished beats ambitious and abandoned, and a narrow tool that works is a stronger entry than a broad one that half does. If it's broken on the day, the screening notes tell you exactly what to fix — and the app stays on your page either way.
Yes, and it's who the challenge is designed for. The typing is the part the AI does. The part that decides who wins is knowing what a good tool does and refusing to ship one that gets the numbers wrong.
Spend ten minutes on a hello world before you decide. It costs nothing and answers the question better than we can.
It's expected — Globefin builds this way and says so publicly. What you can't do is submit an app somebody else built and published as though it were yours.
Finalists record a short walkthrough of their own work, which is what makes the interview guarantee worth something to the firms on the other side of it.
College students and recent graduates. You qualify if you're enrolled at a Kentucky college or university, or if you're a Kentucky resident enrolled anywhere. Graduates qualify for three years after the degree was conferred.
You don't have to study finance, computing, or anything related — any subject, any year, undergraduate or postgraduate. Entrants must be 18 or older, and employees of sponsoring firms can't enter.
Teams of up to 3 are fine. A team shares one prize, and you tell us how it's split when you submit.
For the interviews each team member is considered on their own, so joining a team doesn't cost you a shot at one.
Yes, but a single strong entry beats two thin ones, and the screening round is unforgiving about arithmetic. Most people are better served putting twelve weeks into one thing.
A working first version takes an evening. The difference between that and something that places is the weeks afterwards — testing awkward cases, fixing what breaks, and making it clear enough that a stranger can use it without you sitting next to them.
Their own figures stay on their machine. Anything a user saves goes to a file on their own computer, and there's no server and no account behind any of this.
Your app may call out to look something up — a rate, a price — but it may never send the user's own financial details anywhere. That's the line, and screening checks it: it's the reason people will trust a financial tool from someone they've never heard of.
You need one to publish an app, and it's free. Create an account whenever you're ready — you can build first and sign up later.
It may as well be you. One sentence into an AI assistant is the whole of the first step, and you can take it before you leave this page.
Get your first sentence Put me on the list
Here on behalf of a firm rather than to build?
Sponsorship is over here.
Kentucky PFM Challenge
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