We're pausing new challenges<br>Skip to content

May 22nd, 2026 · 2 min read<br>We're pausing new challenges

Sarup BanskotaCodeCrafters CEO

Paul KuruvillaCodeCrafters CTO

Hey everyone,

It's Sarup and Paul, co-founders of CodeCrafters.

When we began work on this project 4+ years ago, we were excited to create a practice platform that would be worthy of the time and attention of users like yourself - engineers with programming experience.

On some level - we definitely struck a chord. Our build-your-own-x repo climbed to #1 on GitHub, recently becoming the first-ever (and only one in history) to cross half a million stars. Our 400,000+ users have included prolific open-source developers, CEOs of hyper-successful infra startups, and staff engineers at household-name companies.

Above all, every other day, we'd receive a note or comment from someone - from literally everywhere in the world - telling us how CodeCrafters helped them build confidence and level up as an engineer. At times when even we doubted ourselves, it's those notes that kept us going.

Despite this, in all these 4 years, the reality is that we were unsuccessful at turning CodeCrafters into a business that justifies the time, energy, and capital we've put in. We experimented a lot - product experiments, conversion experiments, countless ways of profitably getting in front of more engineers.

We've held on for far longer than the numbers justified - because we love this thing and the community around it. But the gap between "people love it" and "people pay for it at the scale a startup needs" has turned out to be one we couldn't close.

So as of today, we've decided that we'll pause developing new challenges. This has been one of the hardest calls we've had to make in our career.

What this means for you

Nothing materially changes day-to-day.

Andy Li, our Head of Developer Success, has done an excellent job supporting customers this far - and he will continue to maintain CodeCrafters and support our customers. The existing challenges and infra will continue to be available. We'll give a clear, advance notice if that ever changes.

A possible new home

We're also open to CodeCrafters finding a suitable new home.

If you're part of a company whose audience is engineers, and you think CodeCrafters could be a fit, please reach out - sarup@codecrafters.io.

Thank you!

To everyone who starred the repo, tried our challenges, sent us an email, told a friend, sent in feedback, or defended us passionately on Hacker News - a huge thank you. Genuinely. You made this the most meaningful thing Paul and I have worked on, and we're going to carry what we learned here into whatever comes next.