Comfy Dev Platform Challenge: Open Source a Paid Feature, Win $10,000

Comfy Org has announced the Open Call: Comfy Dev Platform Challenge, a two-week community challenge that asks builders to take a creative feature people normally pay a subscription for and rebuild it in the open. The grand prize is $10,000 in cash, with RTX 5090 cards for the other main categories and API credits for the OSS bonus tracks.

The brief starts from a simple observation: cinematic camera controls, character consistency, relighting, and face swap usually sit behind a subscription, but each one is a workflow underneath. Open-weight models have largely closed the capability gap, so the challenge targets the layer on top, namely the interfaces and pipelines that turn a model into something people actually use. Pick a feature people pay for today and ship an open-source version of it.

Timeline

The submission window runs from October 5 through October 19, 2026, closing at 9am PT on Monday, October 19. On October 13 Comfy Org is hosting an evening in San Francisco that brings together the OSS ecosystem, including build time with the Comfy team. The first 100 entrants receive free Comfy credits by Monday, October 5.

Prizes

Top workflows are featured on comfy.org/models, and every entry is eligible for the spotlight reel whether it places or not. The OSS bonus categories add a Best VFX Workflow Built with LTX award ($2,000 in API credits) and a Built with FLUX bonus ($1,000, $500, and $200 for first through third place). Prizes ship directly to winners with customs costs covered by the organizers, and a cash equivalent is offered where shipping is not possible.

How to Enter

Every submission must be built on the Comfy Developer Platform or Comfy Cloud, or run locally with the Comfy SDK. The repository needs an open-source license plus enough setup detail that someone else can run it on their own machine. Other tools, models, and techniques are fair game as long as the demo video explains how they were combined.

Code can be built with the Comfy API, the Comfy SDK, or the Comfy Router, and submissions must be lawful, SFW, and free of unlicensed IP or likenesses. By entering, participants agree to let ComfyUI, NVIDIA, and Runpod feature their work with credit. There is a limit of one submission per person.

Judging

A joint panel of developers from ComfyUI, NVIDIA, and Runpod reviews the entries. The Most Practical category scores real-world usefulness, completeness, and reproducibility, while Most Entertaining scores delight, shareability, and demo quality. Video polish only counts in the Most Entertaining category: everywhere else a plain screen recording scores exactly as well as a polished cut. OSS bonus categories are scored by the model provider teams, and each entry is eligible for both a main prize category and a bonus category.

Questions can go to the Reddit superthread, which hosts an AMA on Thursday, October 8, or the #developer-platform channel on the Comfy Discord.