Today, we finally get to talk about something we’ve been building behind the scenes for months: Buffer Commit, our first build contest on the Buffer API!
We’ll run Buffer Commit every year, and it will grow alongside our builder community.
This year, registration is open from October 15, and the build window runs from October 28 to November 13, 2026. Our prize pool is 10% of our net profit for August 2026, which comes to $25,600, shared equally among up to 16 winners for $1,600 or more each. (We lined up the 16 winners and $1,600 as a small nod to Buffer turning 16 on November 30 of this year.)
The inspiration for Buffer Commit came alongside our release of Buffer’s new public API in May of this year, which we built so that anyone, from a solo creator automating their own posting to a team building a product of their own, could build on top of Buffer. What we’ve seen in the months since has been incredible, and we’re beyond thrilled to be investing in the folks building on our API directly.
In this post, I’ll share a bit more about the why behind this contest, what Buffer Commit is, who it’s for, how it works, and what we hope comes out of year one.
Why we’re doing this
Back in November 2010, Buffer’s Founder CEO Joel Gascoigne built the first version of Buffer during a Startup Sprint to solve a problem he was experiencing himself. He wanted a way to space out when his tweets were sent, and it turned out that plenty of other people were looking for the same solution.
Buffer has grown a lot since then, but that story still matters to us, because it’s a reminder that useful software often starts with one person solving a specific problem in their own work. Sixteen years later, that belief shaped one of the bigger product bets we’ve made.
The API we launched in May is a new product, built over the past year on the same GraphQL foundation that has powered Buffer’s own apps since 2019. It was designed from the start to be open to everyone. We launched it without knowing how many people would build on it. We built it for developers, and just as much for the creators, marketers, and small business owners who connect Buffer to the tools they already use. That’s why we invested in an MCP server, a CLI, and connector integrations alongside the API itself. Since launch, more than 100,000 users have built with the Buffer API, creating more than 300,000 ideas and 20 million posts through it.
Hiding Elephant and PostIQ are two of the many projects that have come out of it, and they’re exactly what we hoped to see. When Amanda Marochko, the Staff Product Manager behind Buffer’s API, wrote about the rebuild last July, she described exactly this. Buffer can’t and shouldn’t build everything itself, and the people closest to a workflow are often the ones best placed to improve it, especially now that AI and low-code tools let far more of them build without an engineering background.
More about Buffer Commit
Our API gives builders the tools to create on top of Buffer, and Buffer Commit puts Buffer’s own resources behind the people building, from time with our team to a public stage for their work.
The name is a nod to the commit, the small act of saving a finished piece of work that every builder on our API will recognize. It also has a nice tie-in to the commitment we’re making to our community, backed by a share of our profit. We capped the number of winners at 16 because Buffer turns 16 on November 30, one share for each year Buffer has been around!
Each winner receives a Commit Award, which includes their equal share of the prize pool, a place in the Buffer Commit project gallery, a mention in our wrap-up blog post, a virtual group session of about 90 minutes with our Founder CEO Joel Gascoigne and the other winners, and a year of Buffer Essentials or their current paid plan covered. Everyone who submits an eligible project will get a Buffer Commit cap, whether they win or not. The full terms cover eligibility and everything else you’ll want to know before you register.
Who Buffer Commit is for
Buffer Commit is open to anyone 18 or older with a Buffer account, free or paid, building alone or as a team. In practice, that covers two kinds of builders:
Power users who’ve built a tool around their own workflow and are ready to open it up so other Buffer users can connect their accounts and use it too.Developers building tools for other people to use, like Hiding Elephant and PostIQ above.
If you’ve built something on Buffer that other people could use, or have an idea for an app that other Buffer users would want, this is for you.
How Buffer Commit works
You can register by logging in with your Buffer account, and registration stays open until submissions close.
For this first edition, we hope to see apps and integrations that solve a real-world problem for the people who use Buffer every day. Whatever you build needs to be publicly available through judging, let any Buffer user connect their account through Buffer OAuth, and make successful calls to the Buffer API.
The build window runs from October 28 to November 13 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Existing projects are welcome, and only work done during this window will be judged.
Our Discord server is home base for the contest. It has a dedicated support forum, office hours with Buffer engineers, and a live Q&A on Zoom on October 27 at 11 a.m. ET, where Joel will share the vision behind Buffer Commit, and the Buffer team will get into contest details to answer any questions you may have. We’ll send you the Zoom invite soon!
To submit, you’ll need a link to your publicly hosted project, a demo video of two minutes or less showing it working end to end, and a short written overview of what you built and why.
Joel Gascoigne (Founder CEO), Amanda Marochko (Staff Product Manager), and Joe Birch (Staff Engineer) will judge every eligible submission on three criteria: whether the project is useful, how well it’s built, and how creative it is. Up to 16 winners will be announced on December 7.
Two additional awards come from the design and content teams at Buffer, chosen from among the winners:
The Delight Award goes to up to three winners with the most distinctive user experience, chosen by our design team.The Build-in-Public Award goes to up to three winners who shared their progress along the way, chosen by our content team.
If you’d like a starting point for posting about your build during the contest, head to the Buffer Template Library and look for the Buffer Commit category. The prompts there give you a structure for sharing your progress, from your first commit to your final demo. To count toward the Build-in-Public Award, each post needs to mention that it’s part of Buffer Commit. Happy posting!
What we hope comes out of this build contest
Buffer exists to help creators and small businesses get off the ground and grow, and for close to 16 years that has meant helping them grow an audience. Buffer Commit extends that mission to the people building on Buffer.
We’re hoping some of these projects outlast the contest: tools that earn their builders something on the side within a few months and, over time, grow into businesses in their own right. We’d love for this contest to be where stories like that begin, and Buffer will keep supporting the ones that take off.
For the builders taking part, we hope the build window gives you three things:
A stretch of focused time to turn an idea into a working project you can keep growing toward real users.A sense of community with the people at Buffer and the other builders working alongside you.A direct line to the team that builds Buffer’s API, so that what you learn while building shapes what we build next.
For the wider Buffer community, we hope it means more tools that fit the way they already work, built by people who understand the problem from the inside.
This is year one
Buffer Commit will return every year, and the builders who take part in this first edition will have the most influence on what it becomes. What you build, the questions you ask in our community, and what you tell us about the API during the contest will shape how we invest next year and the years after that.
Registration is now open, and our Discord community is a great space for accountability, so come hang out and meet other builders. If you’ve already built something on the API, we’d love to see it. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to build, this is it. So, what will you build?
