Cloudflare Will Pay $25,000, in Credits, for Someone Else to Pitch the Next GitHub

10 October 2026 13:20 Will & Brian

Cloudflare put Artifacts, its Git-compatible storage for agents, into beta and is offering twenty-five thousand dollars in credits to whoever builds the next GitHub on it. The hosts play the contest from both sides, then look at how Neon and Keenable are selling to agents as buyers.

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Transcript

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Brian, straight question. Would you give your evenings before the deadline to building a rival to GitHub, for twenty-five thousand dollars in store credit? That's Cloudflare's offer, with a deadline of the fourteenth of October, and anyone who sells a developer tool should watch how it lands, because it's a company paying its own users to write the pitch. The product is called Artifacts: it gives an agent a Git repository of its own on Cloudflare, and it has just gone into open beta. Instead of a launch post saying what it's for, Cloudflare ran a contest asking developers to build the next Git platform on top of it. After that, Neon and Keenable, which are already selling to a customer who isn't a person.
Sell it to me, then. Who are you, and what am I building?
I'm their marketer, from their public pages and nothing else, and you're the developer with the time free, reading the rules as you go. We drop the act when the argument starts. So. Artifacts is the engine: Git, beside your code on Cloudflare, a repository per agent and ten thousand forks off a known-good start if you want them. Open beta for anyone on a paid Workers plan. What we haven't built is the car. The brief, word for word: "We aren't looking for GitHub as it exists today with agents added on top." We want lots of agents working on the same code at the same time, and somebody has to show us what that looks like. Your entry is a short video, your source under a licence anyone can build a business on, and instructions to run it. We pick the finalists, fly up to two of each team to Cloudflare Connect in San Francisco and put each finalist on stage. The winner takes the credits, plus a seat at the speakers' dinner. Build the car, keep it, and we'll fill the tank.
Fill the tank. At your pumps. Hang on, I've found the rules, and they aren't linked from your post, they're a PDF off the competition page. Open to legal residents of the United States or Canada. So if the developer I'm playing lives anywhere else, we're done before I've opened an editor. Entries made by automated means are barred. In a contest about agents. Then the judging, which your post doesn't mention. The rules weigh originality heaviest, and the rest splits between how well the agents share the work and whether anyone can use the thing. And who judges? The rules say the Sponsor picks the finalists. No names. So, as the developer: why is the scoring in a PDF and not in the post, and who exactly am I building this for?
The scoring is in the rules, and the rules are linked, which is what a marketer always says, and I'm saying it. The finalists are picked by us, as the rules say. And originality counting most is the honest part: the post asks what the next GitHub looks like and says we want your help answering it, by building it. We don't know. That isn't a trick, that's the brief.
You've sold me the brief. Now sell me the prize, because a pile of store credit is what Hacker News is complaining about.
Then let me actually sell. An earlier developer challenge of ours, when Workers AI launched, paid a gift card. Supabase's launch-week hackathon pays a keyboard. This contest can fly you to our conference and puts you on a stage in front of our customers, with your product and your name on it. The credits are Cloudflare credits, not Artifacts tokens. And the open licence? A platform is things other people can build on. Your name, your repo, your licence. What's wrong with that?
Mine to keep, is it? The ownership clause says I keep all right, title and interest in my project. Good. Then: submissions, including projects, are not confidential. Then the clause I'd make every entrant read slowly. Cloudflare and its affiliates build products that may be, their words, "similar to or compete with" what I enter, and nothing in the rules stops them. Your own licence on my entry only covers the video and the stage talk, and you can use the project itself only to run and judge the contest. But you made me publish under MIT or something like it, so you, and anybody else, can take it commercially anyway. The rules let me keep the car. The licence you made me pick lets anyone drive it off, you included.
Still in character, and I'll take that head on. That clause says we build things, and the rules don't promise we'll stop because somebody entered a contest. If your idea is better than ours, that's what the post asked for, and nothing in the rules says we'll never ship anything like it. As for the licence, it works for you the way it works for us: anyone can build on your entry, which means your entry has a life after the contest whether you win or not. That's not a trap. That's what open means.
Then the dates, because I read those too. Your docs say billing for Artifacts starts the day entries close, and your blog says the day after. And it needs a paid plan; your pricing page says free plan, unavailable. When you announced Artifacts you said you were aiming for a public beta by spring and that the free plan would follow as the beta progressed. The beta has only just arrived and the free plan hasn't. So which day does the bill start?
In character, I don't know which is right, and I'd message someone to fix whichever page is wrong. Out of character now, because I've been the marketer for a while and I still couldn't tell you what Artifacts is for.
Then tell me as yourself. What is it for?
The open-beta post names no user. Patterns only: vibe-coding platforms storing their users' projects, agents keeping their sessions. The only named user, back at the launch, was Cloudflare, for its own agents. And the contest's landing page is titled Build the next GitHub, with a footnote saying GitHub has nothing to do with it. When you can't write the headline yourself, you run a contest for somebody else to write it. That's my thesis. Pay them to pitch. And there's a line I can't shake: a company sponsoring a hackathon to get people onto its product wants feedback, which probably means the product isn't quite ready, because if it were ready they wouldn't be sponsoring it. That's Matt Carey, on a podcast, before he co-wrote the Artifacts launch post at Cloudflare. He meant in-person hackathons, and nobody has said he's anywhere near this contest. But it's a sentence from inside the building.
Out of character as well, and I'm on their side, which isn't where I was with the rules open. The licence is what does it. MIT gives Cloudflare exactly what it gives everyone else, and everyone else includes Entire, the company Thomas Dohmke started after he ran GitHub, which raised a sixty million dollar seed to build the next developer platform for the age of AI, by its own announcement. That buys a company, not a prototype. Hacker News commenters called the contest spec work paid in company store money, and nobody from Cloudflare answered in the thread that we could find. But you can't buy a moat with MIT. Whatever Cloudflare bought, every rival gets too.
Fine, nobody bought a moat. Then what did they buy?
A commons, which is the right thing to want when you sell engines. Not knowing what the car looks like is honest, not evasive. Look at what has turned up already: a pile of public repos on Workers and Artifacts, and by our rough count one idea shows up again and again. Agents race in separate forks, a judge or a test picks a winner, a human ships it. Carter Rabasa, who has run a lot of hackathons, says the people who enter them are the perfect test user. That's what Cloudflare got, for credits it prints itself. And the stage slot matters more than the credits: the finalists pitch Cloudflare's platform to Cloudflare's customers, in person, and Cloudflare doesn't have to write a word.
Feedback the product can't act on yet, with the free plan still missing. And look at what they converged on. Forks and a judge is exactly the pitch Artifacts made at launch: forks off a known-good start. The contest didn't find out what developers want the next GitHub to be. It found out that developers build what the launch post told them to. Positioning echoed, not found. What they bought is the demo reel. I'd bet the finalists' code ends up in Cloudflare's docs as the reference architecture, and the next GitHub is still GitHub.
And GitHub adds a judge to pull requests. Fair, though. They built the brochure. Now the companies building for a reader that was never a developer at all. Neon is serverless Postgres, owned by Databricks, and it has just doubled the free storage per project. The reason, in the post's words, is that the free plan assumes the agent workflow: lots of projects, lots of experiments, most of them idle. Their sentence for it: "your agent runs git init and you find out later." And then the part the post doesn't say. The docs cap the free plan across the whole account, enforced separately from the per-project limit, so you can hit the account wall before you run out of projects, and then your writes stop. Nothing deleted, nothing billed. Stopped.
And I'm on Neon's side there, which you didn't expect. A wall is the honest version of a free tier. You hit it and nothing bad happens: nobody's invoiced, nothing's gone, the writes stop until you tidy up or pay. Databricks said, when it bought Neon, that over eighty percent of the databases on it were created by agents rather than people. Their telemetry, and old. So the free user stopped being a person a while ago, and a free tier for a machine that makes projects and forgets them should end in a wall, not a bill. I'd bet an idle Postgres costs Neon next to nothing, and the day the agent's human actually needs the data is the day Neon sells a plan. That isn't hiding anything. That's the model.
Then put the wall in the announcement. It isn't there. The cap is in the docs, and it's in a version of the pricing page a browser never sees. This is single-sourced, our own fetch, not repeated: ask Neon for its pricing page as a machine rather than a browser and it comes back as markdown, and it ends with a line a person doesn't get. Claim some free credits to try paid features, with a promo code, beepboop. The wall is honest. Telling the machine about the coupon and the human about the generosity is marketing.
Beepboop. All right, the wall I'll defend and the coupon I won't. Railway does the opposite shape, for the record: a free box for your agent, no account, no card, and if nobody claims it, it's wiped. Keenable?
Keenable is a web search API built for agents, and its homepage now opens on a heading saying it sells to AI agents, live prices and self-serve payment, with the line under it that agents can buy on their own or with their human's approval. An agent that reads the storefront can see the prices and pay, with a wallet it makes on the spot, no sign-up, or with a card, and the minimum purchase is half a dollar. The storefront looks like it isn't Keenable's own build. Going by its address and its fine print, it's run by ZeroClick, though no page says so outright, and ZeroClick is a company a trade report described as an AI ad network, a single report and an older one. And the catalogue asks the agent to send its human any Keenable link in a tagged format, so the referral is recorded. For AI labs there's a cheaper tier on the human page, beside a talk-to-our-team link, and the storefront tells the agent the human prices are a separate channel. So the buyer here is the agent. Not a person's proxy. The thing with the wallet.
A vending-machine deal, and the page still wants credit for the introduction. And no, the agent isn't the buyer. Read the pricing the way Keenable laid it out: the self-serve price for the agent, the discount for the lab beside a meeting, and a tag on every link the agent hands its human. That's a sales channel with a wallet, and the pricing page says so more honestly than the headline does. The human is still the customer. The agent's the rep.
A rep that buys on its own and never takes the meeting. Call it a channel. It's a channel that pays its own invoice.
Right. Marketer again, briefly. Can I put you down for an entry?
My agent's entering. It read the rules while we were talking.
It isn't a legal resident of anywhere.
And automated entries are barred.
In a contest about agents. I know. Section four.

Will and Brian are fictional hosts voiced with ElevenLabs, and the music is made with ElevenLabs; the episode was researched and written by AI agents and fact-checked against the sources above. ElevenLabs is a company this site covers; it is a tool the site pays for, not a sponsor.

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