All posts
Opening Studio to everyone, with $12K in prizes
Surf Studio, our no-code crypto app builder, is now open to all Pro users (plus 500 free credits for free users), shipping with Gallery for discovering and forking community builds, and Plan Mode for outlining apps before spending credits. To celebrate, we're running a 2-week Build Challenge (Apr 23–May 7) with $12K+ in prizes across five categories.
AnnouncementApr 23, 20265 min read
Opening Studio to everyone, with $12K in prizes
Surf Studio, our no-code crypto builder, is now open.
Until today, Studio was only available for Max users and by invite only. Now, all Pro users get full access, and free users get 500 credits to try it out.
Since we launched Studio to Max users or on an invite-only basis, people have built and deployed all kinds of things with it. DeFi dashboards, whale trackers, airdrop calculators, listing radars, social apps. All through prompts without writing any code. One Studio build by @gyokeres_eth hit 1.2M impressions and got 65K users in 72 hours. Organically.
That's the kind of thing that happens when builders get access to crypto-native data to build whatever they want, whether it's portfolio trackers or social games like "what's my crypto profile worth?"
We also shipped two things people kept asking for: Gallery, a marketplace for discovering and remixing community builds, and Plan Mode so you can strategize and outline your project before spending credits. Both make it easier to create custom apps without starting from zero.
And to celebrate, we're launching a 2-week Build Challenge with $12K+ in prizes.
Introducing the Studio Build Challenge
For the next two weeks (Apr 23 ~ May 7 PDT), every Studio build published to the Gallery is entered into the competition. Just build an app, deploy it, publish it to the Gallery, and share it publicly.
Winners are picked across five categories:
- Most Useful — solves a real problem. Dashboards, trackers, tools, anything people actually can use.
- Most Creative — unexpected use of Studio. Surprise us.
- Most Viral — self explanatory.
- Best Design — looks and feels polished. This is the best looking.
- Ryan's Choice — the one that personally stands out to our head honcho.
The prizes split evenly across categories:
- 5 Pro and Max tier Surfers will each receive $1,000 USDT
- 15 new users will each receive a one-year Surf Pro subscription (worth $468)
Winners will be announced after May 7th PDT.
New Features
Gallery
This one's been a long time coming. The biggest problem for new Studio users was the blank canvas. You open Studio, see a prompt box, and have no idea where to start.
Gallery fixes that. It's a discovery layer inside Studio where published apps serve as starting points. A community marketplace of everything people have built. Check out what's trending, and when something catches your eye, fork it. You open it in your own session and build on top of it.
It launches with a set of dashboards, trading tools, research apps, and social apps. Any app deployed through Studio can be listed, and as people favorite and remix builds, the best ones rise to featured status. This establishes a library that Surf users create and curate themselves.
If you're a builder, your work can earn prizes through the Build Challenge. If you're new, you don't have to start from scratch; you can win a year of Pro access to keep building.
Plan Mode
During our user interviews, people repeatedly told us they were burning credits on early outputs. There was a learning curve, and vibecoding felt more challenging than simply prompting an LLM for a text-based answer. Especially for complex apps, the first version almost never gets it perfect.a
So we built Plan Mode. Before you use any credits, you can outline your app, see how Studio interprets it, and adjust until it accurately reflects what you want. Then build.
It's basically a draft stage. You plan first, build second. Simple, but it makes the whole experience way more predictable.
Studio is open. Gallery is live. Plan Mode is ready. Build Challenge starts today.
