HCB is now open source!

Sam Poder

Ian Madden

Gary Tou

Manu Gurudath

Ruien Luo

Mar 29, 2025

Hack Club launched HCB in 2018 to enable hackathons to raise and spend money through fiscal sponsorship. Since then, we’ve expanded to all nonprofit projects; our 12,000 users have transacted $50 million.

Local student-ran hackathons, robotics teams, and community groups use HCB as a nonprofit neobank to collect donations, send payments, issue debit cards, and gain 501(c)(3) status.

When we started HCB, it was developed in private for security reasons. That said, one of Hack Club’s core principles has always been transparency - we open source our finances, document how we run events, and have 500+ public repositories on GitHub.

github.com/hackclub/hcb is now public - check it out and star it.

Paired with our technical documentation, it’s a great resource for anyone interested in building financial software or applications with Ruby on Rails. Our engineering work is also entirely public; the world can learn from our successes and mistakes.

Since 2018, over fifty people have made 10k+ commits to HCB (thank you!); we can’t wait for more contributors to join us:

PS: if you’re looking to start a nonprofit, we’re accepting applications! Head over to nonprofit.new and we’ll be in touch.