Student hackathon · India-wide · 100% remote
Connect ’26
Build a real integration into HelloBooks — the payment and payroll systems that businesses in the US actually run on. Free to enter, teams of two or three, run entirely online from wherever you are — and the shortlist is decided by what you build, not by your CV.
Dates
Announced soon
Registration is open now and there is no deadline yet. Register your team and we will email you the dates the moment they are fixed — you will get them before anyone else.
- Entry fee
- Free
- Format
- Fully remote
- Team size
- 2 or 3
- Prize pool
- ₹50,000
- Internships
- Paid, open now
- Dates
- Announced soon
How it works
Four stages, all of them online. You take part from wherever you are — no travel, no venue, no overnight sitting in a hall. What we ask instead is that you show your work.
Stage 1 · Online · Free
Learn the domain
Three sessions · dates announced soon
Live sessions that teach you what you need: how an accounting ledger actually works, how a real payroll integration is put together, and what we look for when we judge. Recorded, so you can catch up. No accounting background needed — the first one starts from what a debit is.
Stage 2 · Online
Qualifying round
6 hours · one Saturday
A scoped exercise against our developer sandbox with your team. Authenticate, read some data, write a transaction, and handle the failures we throw at you on purpose. Six hours, not overnight.
Stage 3 · Online
The build window
72 hours · one long weekend
Shortlisted teams build a complete working connector across a long weekend — on your own schedule, sleeping normally. Our engineers hold scheduled office hours on Discord throughout. Your repository has to show the work: we read commit history, not just the final zip.
Stage 4 · Online
Demo day
Live on video · one afternoon
Every finalist team presents live: ten minutes to walk us through what you built and why, then five minutes where we ask you about your own code. Judged live, results the same day.
What you will build
An integration is how one system talks reliably to another it does not control. You pick a track when you register; the specific problem is revealed at the start of each round.
US payments
Pull settlements, fees and payouts out of a payment processor and land them correctly in a business’s books.
Stripe · Square · PayPal · Authorize.Net
US payroll
Take a payroll run — salaries, taxes, contractor payments — and turn it into journal entries that balance.
Gusto · Finch · Deel · OnPay
Spend & expenses
Bills, corporate cards and reimbursements flowing in, with approvals and receipt matching.
Ramp · Brex · Expensify · Bill.com
Surprise us
Propose your own integration when you register. If it is good and it is buildable in a weekend, we will approve it.
Tell us what and why
Prizes, and what else you get
Cash to the winning teams, and a separate route to a paid internship that does not depend on where you place.
First
₹25,000
plus a ₹25,000 bounty if we ship your connector
Second
₹15,000
per team
Third
₹10,000
per team
Every finalist
Fast-track
skip our first interview round for 12 months, win or lose
Paid internships are open through this hackathon — six-month and summer positions. We discuss the stipend with you directly when we make an offer. Winning and being offered an internship are separate outcomes. We fully intend to hire people who did excellent work and did not place.
You keep your code. You own the copyright and your repository stays yours. If we want to ship what you built, we ask — and we pay a bounty for it.
Who can enter
Three levels. Only the first is a requirement — the other two are what makes a strong application, not a gate. Register even if you only clear level one.
Level 1 · Required
The basics
If you clear this, you can enter.
- MERN — MongoDB, Express, React, Node — or any equivalent stack you can build in end to end
- Ordinary program flow: loops, conditionals, functions, async/await
- You have built a CRUD app and can explain what each part of it does
- Git and GitHub
- You can read API documentation and work from it
Level 2 · Expected on top
The working layer
What separates a project from something that runs.
- Calling a third-party REST API that needs authentication
- What your code does when the other side returns a 500 or rate-limits you
- Designing a table or collection that survives a second feature
- Environment config, and never committing secrets
- A sense of why an application is structured the way it is
Level 3 · What we value most
Something of your own
This is what actually gets you hired.
- You have built something start to finish that nobody assigned you
- You can walk through its architecture out loud
- You know what you would do differently the second time
- You can say what breaks first when the load goes up
- Built with AI assistance? Completely fine — see below
Use AI freely. Understand your architecture completely.
Building with Copilot, Claude or Cursor is completely fine — most working engineers do, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we care about is whether you can explain the thing you shipped: why those pieces, what talks to what, what breaks first when the data gets ten times bigger, and what you would change. That is the whole test, and it is why demo day ends with five minutes of questions about your own code. Generated code you understand is an advantage. Generated code you cannot account for is the one thing that will lose you marks.
Also required
- 18 or over, enrolled in any degree — or graduated in the last 12 months
- A team of two or three. Register on your own and we will match you
- A laptop and a stable internet connection
You do not need
- Any accounting knowledge — we teach it beforehand, starting from scratch
- To have done an internship, or to be from a CSE branch
- Any experience with integrations, OAuth or webhooks
- To live in any particular city — every round is online, from anywhere in India
- To use MERN specifically — an equivalent stack is equally welcome
If your laptop is short on memory or your connection is unreliable, register anyway and tell us in the form. We publish a cloud development environment that runs the whole thing in your browser, so nothing heavy has to run on your machine.
Register your team
One person registers on behalf of the team. You will need your teammates’ names and email addresses — everyone gets a confirmation. Takes about three minutes.
Questions
Is it really free?
Yes. There is no entry fee, no registration charge and no deposit at any stage. If anyone asks you for money in connection with Connect 26, it is not us — please report it to the address at the bottom of this page.
Is any part of this in person?
No. Connect 26 runs entirely online, end to end — the sessions, the qualifying round, the build window and demo day. You never need to travel and there is no overnight event. Where a partner college hosts a watch party for demo day you are welcome to join, but that is optional and social, not part of the competition.
Why 72 hours instead of a 24-hour hackathon?
Because a 24-hour format only makes sense when everyone is in one room. Remotely it just means an unsupervised all-nighter, which produces worse code and excludes anyone who cannot sit up all night. A long weekend lets you sleep, think, and build something that actually works — and we would rather judge that.
I do not have a team. Can I still register?
Yes. Register with whoever you have — even just yourself — and tick the box asking for a teammate. We run a matching pool and introduce people before the qualifying round. Most solo registrants find a team.
I have never touched accounting software. Is this for me?
It is. The free sessions assume nothing — the first one starts by explaining what a debit is. What we are actually looking for is someone who can make one system talk to another and think carefully about what happens when it fails. That is learnable, and we teach it.
Who owns what we build?
You do. You keep the copyright and your repository stays yours — put it on your CV, reuse it, open-source it. If we would like to ship your connector in HelloBooks, we will ask your permission and pay a bounty for it.
Do I need to win to get an internship?
No, and we want to be clear about this. Prizes go to the top teams; internship offers go to the people we most want to work with. Those are different judgements and they often land on different people. Every finalist also skips our first interview round for the next twelve months.
Questions: connect@hellobooks.ai · No fee is charged at any stage of Connect ’26.