Hackathon Guide

Everything you need to run a hackathon with Stripe Projects

Hackathon Format

The first 15 minutes of this workshop will be spent explaining Stripe Projects, giving participants some app ideas, and getting them set up in the CLI. The 30+ minutes after that they'll be using their agents to build an application from start to deploy, provisioning services with Stripe Projects along the way.

At the end, participants can submit their deployed project to the leaderboard, where those participating can vote on the winner. Be sure to give participants the correct hackathon code to use when submitting their project to the leaderboard.

Are you a participant?

Follow the step-by-step setup guide to get your environment ready and start building.

Open Participant Guide →

What is Stripe Projects?

Stripe Projects is a CLI tool by Stripe that lets you (or your agent) spin up full-stack apps with pre-configured providers (databases, auth, AI, and more) in minutes. It handles account provisioning, environment variables, and wiring so you can focus on building.

Think of it as a composable app starter that connects real services — not mock APIs — and gives you production-ready credentials from the start.

Example Project Ideas

AI chat app with memory — use OpenRouter for LLM access, Supabase for auth + chat history, and Vercel for hosting
Voice-narrated blog — static site on Netlify with ElevenLabs text-to-speech for each post and Turso for content storage
Real-time analytics dashboard — deploy on Railway with Neon Postgres for data, PostHog for event tracking, and Cloudflare KV for caching
Web scraper with search — Firecrawl for crawling, Upstash Vector for embeddings, Algolia for search UI, hosted on Cloudflare Workers
Team task board — Clerk for auth, Railway Postgres for storage, Inngest for background jobs, deployed on Vercel
AI image gallery — Hugging Face for model inference, Cloudflare R2 for image storage, Neon for metadata, Sentry for error tracking

Example Prompts

Participants can copy these into their AI coding assistant to get started quickly:

starter prompts

# Full-stack to-do web app with auth and persistence
Use the Stripe Projects CLI to create a llama-themed to-do web app with persistent storage and auth that allows me to access my account on the web. Use only free tier services.

# AI-powered app with hosting
Build a recipe generator app. Use OpenRouter for AI, Neon Postgres to save favorites, Clerk for login, and deploy to Vercel. Use Stripe Projects to provision everything.

# Data pipeline with search
Create a news aggregator that crawls RSS feeds with Firecrawl, stores articles in Turso, indexes them with Algolia, and deploys on Railway. Provision all services with Stripe Projects.

Setting Up Stripe

Participants need a Stripe account to use Projects - it's free and no business is required. If they don't already have one, there's no need to register manually: running stripe projects init guides them through creating a new Stripe account in the browser.

The CLI and Projects plugin cover everything else — see Installing the Projects Plugin below to get set up.

Installing the Projects Plugin

First, add the Stripe skill in the terminal so your AI coding assistant knows how to install and configure the CLI and plugin:

step 1 — add skill

$ npx skills add https://docs.stripe.com

Then run this prompt in your AI assistant to complete the setup:

step 2 — run prompt

Install the Stripe CLI, install the `projects` plugin, verify `stripe projects --help` works.

Your agent will install the CLI plugin and verify it's working. Once stripe projects --help outputs the command list, you're ready to go.

In case you need to install the CLI manually, here's the CLI installation guide for your platform:

manual installation

# universal (NPM)
$ npm install -g @stripe/cli

# macOS (Homebrew)
$ brew install stripe/stripe-cli/stripe

# Windows (Scoop)
$ scoop install stripe

Files Added by stripe projects init

Next, run the init command to initialize your new application:

project structure

$ stripe projects init
# If needed, this will guide you through creating a new Stripe account in the browser

This will scaffold the following files in your project:

project structure

# Source of truth for current providers and account details
.projects/state.json
.projects/state.local.json

# Skills files for agents based on providers
.agents/skills
AGENTS.md
CLAUDE.md

# Environment variables added by Projects
.env

Stripe Projects Commands

It's time to start building! Remember that you'll need to either deploy your app to a hosting provider or submit it to a registry such as npm if you're building a library in order to add your project to the leaderboard. Below is a cheat sheet for the commands you'll use most often.

Full reference: docs.stripe.com/projects

cheat sheet

# Initialize a new project
$ stripe projects init <app-name>

# Switch or set up a new Stripe account
$ stripe projects switch-account

# Browse available providers
$ stripe projects catalog

# Add a provider to your project
$ stripe projects add <provider>/<service>

# Open a provider's dashboard
$ stripe projects open <provider>

# Sync environment variables
$ stripe projects env --pull

# Check your spend
$ stripe projects spend

# Get your Stripe account ID (required for leaderboard)
$ stripe whoami

# Share your project (required for leaderboard)
$ stripe projects share

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