Kentucky college students build free personal financial management software. Kentucky firms put up the prize money and pick the winners. Everything built stays free to the public, permanently.
Everything below this point is shared ground. These two doors are where the detail lives, and each one is written for exactly one of you.
Twelve weeks to make one app that helps people handle their money. You don't need to know how to code — you describe what it should do and an AI assistant writes it.
Sponsorship is the prize pool. There's no overhead taken out of it, and sponsors decide the winners by weighted vote rather than handing it to a panel.
College students and recent graduates: enrolled at a Kentucky college or university, or a Kentucky resident enrolled anywhere.
Graduates stay eligible for 3 years after the degree was conferred. Any subject, any year. Entrants must be 18 or older.
A single HTML file that opens in a browser with no install and no account. It may call a public service to look something up, but a person's own financial details never leave their machine.
Every winning app is published free, under an open licence, with the author's name on it.
Globefin screens every entry for eligibility, accessibility and arithmetic. Sponsors then rank ten finalists.
Votes are weighted by contribution and capped at 25%, so no single firm can decide it. The tally is published.
Firms commit. The pool and the sponsor list are published before a single entry is accepted, so entrants know what they're competing for.
Submissions open. Optional sponsor briefings at week three and week eight on what the industry needs from a planning tool.
Entries close. Every one is checked against the published requirements, and everyone is told in writing how theirs did.
Sponsors rank the finalists. Winners announced January 8, 2027, with interviews scheduled inside ninety days.
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 often does.
The full technical brief — single file, save and reopen, accessibility, and the conditions attached to calling an API — is at globefin.org/webapp-requirements, and is summarised for entrants on the entry page.
Sponsors are being signed now, and founding sponsors get a say in the rules before they're fixed. Firms that commit before September 15, 2026 are named on every page of the challenge.
Sponsor the challengeBecause it removes the two things that kill a free financial tool: a company that has to keep existing, and a database of other people's money. One file with no install still runs in ten years, and there's nothing behind it to breach.
It also means a student can finish one in twelve weeks, which a conventional web app with accounts and hosting is not.
Using an AI assistant is expected — it's how Globefin builds, and we say so publicly. The typing was never the hard part. Knowing what a good tool does, spotting where it gets the numbers wrong, and finishing it is the hard part, and that's what separates the entries.
Finalists record a short walkthrough of their own work, which is what keeps the interview guarantee worth something to both sides.
They stay up, free, under an open licence, with the author's name attached. Entrants keep ownership and can withdraw at any time; sponsors can use them with clients without asking anyone or paying anything.
Strong entries are also considered for Globefin Basics designation — the one app we point every visitor at for a given job — whether or not they place.
The challenge runs once the prize pool clears $10,000. Below that, nothing is charged to sponsors and the challenge is postponed rather than run badly.
Entrants are told the confirmed pool before submissions open, so nobody spends twelve weeks on an unfunded promise.
Globefin. We host the platform, screen the entries, verify the arithmetic and administer the vote, at no cost to the prize pool — every dollar sponsors put in goes to entrants.
Questions either way to admin@globefin.org.
Three months, and Kentucky ends the year with a set of financial tools any family in the state can download and keep.
I want to build something My firm wants to fund it
Kentucky PFM Challenge
admin@globefin.org