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Crescent is a Hack Club program. You build something you actually want to build, track the time you spend on it with Hackatime, ship it, and the approved hours become stars. Stars buy real things: hardware, grants, software licences, from a shop run by people on the team.

That is the whole loop. Everything else on this page is the detail behind it.

What Hack Club is

Hack Club is a nonprofit run by and for teenagers who make things. It runs a Slack that tens of thousands of teenagers are in, it moves real money to teen-run clubs and events through HCB, and it runs programs like this one.

Nothing here costs anything. There is no course to buy, no subscription, no upsell, and nobody is collecting your work to sell it. Crescent is one of Hack Club’s You Ship, We Ship programs, and the bargain is exactly what the name says: you ship something real and open, and something real ships back to you.

What you get

• Things. Keyboards, microcontrollers, single-board computers, headphones, 3D printers, cameras, games, domains, cloud credit. The shop tells you what each item costs in stars, and under the price it says roughly how many approved hours that is at this week’s rate, so you can always see what something costs you in work.
• A project that exists. Public repository, working demo, written up. That is worth more six months from now than the stars are.
• People. Other teenagers building at the same time, in the same Slack, who will look at your thing.

The loop, once

1. Set up Hackatime. It is a plugin for your editor that records what you work on and for how long. Nothing else counts as evidence of time: not commits, not estimates, not screenshots.
2. Create a project and pick a card. A card is a small optional challenge with a multiplier attached. If none of them appeal, take the wildcard, which has no requirement and pays the full base rate.
3. Build the thing. With Hackatime running.
4. Ship it. A ship is a snapshot sent for review: repository, demo, description, screenshot, linked Hackatime projects.
5. A reviewer reads it and approves the hours they can verify. Approved hours times the card’s multiplier become stars.
6. Spend them.

You can ship the same project again, in any week

A project is not over when you ship it. Come back to it a week later or two months later, do more work, and ship it again. The new hours are reviewed and paid like any others.

This works no matter how old the project is and no matter which week you are in now. You are never forced to abandon something to start earning again, and there is no penalty for a project that keeps growing. Two things to know:

• Each ship pays only the hours above the last approved one, and needs at least thirty new tracked minutes to be worth sending.
• The card is fixed at the first ship. An update to an old project is paid at that project’s multiplier, not at whatever is on offer this week.

Is this legitimate?

Fair question, and asking it is the right instinct.

• The shop is funded by Hack Club, a registered nonprofit, and orders are placed by named people on the team.
• Your code stays yours. The requirement is that the repository is public, not that you sign anything over.
• The rules that decide whether a ship passes are written down here in the handbook, not decided per person behind a curtain.
• You are never asked for money, for a payment method, or for anything beyond what shipping an order needs.

Before you start

Read How hours are counted, because that is the part people most often get wrong, and How to ship your first project for the walkthrough. If you want to know what to build, What makes a good project.