Run your club's competitions and fest events on CTF7
Cyber clubs, tech fest committees, OWASP and null chapters and college competition teams can run monthly CTFs, meetups, private team trials and the big inter-college event. Run your first round free, move to Organization Starter for a season of rounds, and use Standard for fest day. Every plan is hosted on CTF7, so nobody on the committee babysits a server.
Run club and fest events without burning out your core team
A club loses members when its core team spends every weekend fixing infrastructure instead of hosting events.
Without a platform
- One volunteer maintains a self-hosted scoreboard, and leaves when they graduate
- Meetup RSVPs live in one tool, CTFs in another, and member lists in a spreadsheet
- Every event starts from zero, so there's no history and no progression for members
- Sponsors and speakers are hard to find without visibility beyond your city
With CTF7
- A free jeopardy event for your first club round, Organization Starter for a season of rounds, and Standard when the fest needs scale
- CTFs, meetups and RSVPs managed from one organizer dashboard
- Past events, rankings and writeups stay on the platform for members to revisit
- A community partner program for co-hosting, shoutouts and speaker access
Faculty coordinator or HOD planning labs and graded assessments? See CTF7 for universities, the classroom CTF kit, or the guide to pitching your HOD.
Stop maintaining your own CTF platform
Plenty of college clubs have built or forked their own CTF site, and it's a great learning project. Keeping it alive under fest-day load, year after year, is a different job.
Every September the same thing happens: the senior who knew how the deploy works has graduated, a dependency is out of date, and registrations open in two weeks. Your club's real asset is its challenges and its people, not the scoreboard code. Keep the repo as a portfolio project and spend the committee's hours on challenges, sponsors and players.
Your challenge files come with you: upload static flags and attachments on any plan, and bring your own Docker challenge images on Standard. Premium adds managed container deployment. Wondering how a hosted platform compares with other options, or with running your own? Read how to choose a CTF platform for your college and how colleges run a cyber lab without servers.
What your committee doesn't have to do on Standard
- Provision and patch servers. Every plan is hosted on CTF7, and Standard runs your container challenges too. There's no VPS to rent and no hostel-room machine to babysit before the qualifier.
- Referee flag-sharing fights. Dynamic flags are unique to each team, and anti-cheat adds IP and browser tracking, alerts and submission logs. Disputes get settled with evidence, not arguments.
- Match UPI screenshots to a Google Form. Fee collection and team registration happen on the event page itself.
- Hand over a server password to next year's team. There is no server; next year's committee is added to the same organizer account.
Free for your first round, Standard for the fest
A typical club needs both: a free event for its first round, and Standard for the event that's open to other colleges, priced per event with no subscription. Free covers one event a year, up to 50 participants. For a season of practice rounds, Organization Starter (₹999 a month) includes two events a month for up to 100 participants each.
Free
For your first club round, a beginner night or a team trial
- Jeopardy-style CTF
- Static flags & attachments
- External links
- One free event a year, up to 50 participants
Standard
For tech fests and inter-college CTFs
- Custom branding
- Static & dynamic flags, anti-cheat
- Attachments, links and hints
- Bring-your-own Docker challenge images
- Up to 500 participants
- Participation certificates
- Email & WhatsApp support
Move from Free to Standard when any of these is true
- You expect more than 50 players
- The event is open to other colleges
- There's prize money, so flag sharing matters
- Your challenges need Docker images
- The fest wants its own name, logo and colors on the event
- Nobody on the committee wants to run infrastructure
Unlimited participants, a custom domain and full setup by the CTF7 team are on Premium, quoted per event. See all plans or estimate your budget with the CTF cost calculator.
Event ideas for your club calendar
Mix these across the year to keep beginners coming back and give your strongest players something to chase.
What organizers use at every community event
The Free plan is hosted on CTF7, with nothing to install, and gives you a jeopardy-style CTF with static flags, attachments and external links for up to 50 participants, a good fit for a chapter's first practice round. The features below are what organizers work with day to day; plan limits are on the pricing page.
- Real-time scoreboard with points, solves and time taken
- Team management for solo or team play
- Recognition for members through CTF7 events
- Announcements to push hints and updates mid-event
- Public or private events: open to all, or invite-only for members
Open your CTF to other colleges
When your annual flagship event draws more than 50 players, or you want to stop flag sharing, move to Standard (₹9,999 per event) for up to 500 participants, with custom branding, dynamic flags, anti-cheat, hints and bring-your-own Docker challenge images.
OWASP PCCoE Pune runs ByteMe CTF on CTF7. It's a good example of a student chapter's flagship event, and public events like it are listed on the events page for players across India to find.
Free vs StandardSample tech fest CTF timeline
An eight-week plan for a two-round inter-college CTF: an online qualifier followed by an on-site final at the fest.
Read the college CTF playbookT–8 weeks: Lock the plan
Fix dates, budget, prize pool and format with your faculty coordinator. Choose the plan, decide whether you need custom challenges, and draft the event rules (start from our CTF rules template). If the department still needs convincing, use our guide to pitching your HOD.
T–6 weeks: Open registration
Publish the branded event page with rules, team sizes and the registration fee. Campus ambassadors and partner clubs start promoting it at other colleges. If the event is open and team-based, consider listing it on CTFtime.
T–4 weeks: Build and review challenges
Your club writes challenges (see how to create CTF challenges and these challenge ideas) or the CTF7 team builds them. Aim for a curve: several warm-ups every team can solve, a strong middle, a few hard ones for the top ten. Decide on static or dynamic scoring.
T–2 weeks: Playtest
Have seniors solve every challenge from the description to the flag. On Standard, verify dynamic flags, hints and your Docker challenge images. Run through your launch checklist: rules, flag format and scoreboard visibility.
T–1 week: Online qualifier
A 24-hour jeopardy round. On Standard, anti-cheat monitoring keeps it honest, and the top teams on the scoreboard are invited to the final.
Fest day: On-site final
Finalists compete in the lab while the scoreboard runs on the auditorium screen. Close with the prize ceremony, then issue certificates.
Budgeting tips for a college CTF
- Start on Free. Run your first club round free (one free event a year, up to 50 players). Budget for Organization Starter (₹999 a month) if you run monthly rounds, and for Standard per event for the fest.
- Let registrations fund the platform. As an illustration: at ₹150 per team, 75 registrations pay for a ₹9,999 Standard event after CTF7's 10% platform fee (before payment-gateway charges), and every team after that adds to the prize pool.
- Sponsor a category. Local security companies often like sponsoring a track, such as "Web challenges presented by…", in exchange for visibility.
- Pay for challenges only where it matters. Write the warm-ups yourself and commission the hard ones through custom challenge development.
- Talk to us early. If you're a student-run event on a tight budget, ask us what's possible.
A 100-team fest CTF
An illustration, not a quote: figures are after CTF7's 10% platform fee and before payment-gateway charges. Standard covers up to 500 participants, so check your team sizes. Add sponsor money on top, and run your own numbers in the CTF cost calculator.
Grow your community with CTF7
For clubs, hacker collectives, student chapters and CTF teams. Partners such as CyberX Nashik and Cyberonites already work with us.
Events & co-hosting
Co-host CTFs and events with CTF7 and reach players beyond your campus.
Visibility & shoutouts
Your events promoted across CTF7's social channels.
Speakers & mentorship
Access to speakers for your meetups and mentorship for your core team.
Private CTF rounds
Members-only rounds for training your competitive team or running trials.
Early invites
Early access to upcoming CTF7 events for your members.
Campus Ambassadors
Club leads can also join the Campus Ambassador program for swag, certificates and internships.
Grow from 10 members to a competing team
Each stage is aimed at a smaller, more committed group than the one before. The first event is for anyone curious; the last one is the event other colleges travel to.
| Stage | Who it is for | What you run | Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1: kickoff | Anyone curious, including non-CS students | An intro talk with RSVPs, then a two-hour round of warm-ups only. Send newcomers what a CTF is and the tools list beforehand. | Free |
| Month 2 onward: monthly rounds | The people who came back | One category a month, with solvers publishing writeups for the next batch | Organization Starter (2 events a month, up to 100 players each) |
| Month 3: team trials | Members who want to compete | An invite-only round to pick a team for the next CTF7 event; see building a CTF team | Organization Starter |
| Month 4: flagship | Other colleges and communities | Your open event, ideally co-hosted with a partner club. The fest timeline above works backward from the date. | Standard if more than 100 players |
How to run a monthly community CTF people come back to
Habits that keep a monthly community CTF going.
Full guide: how to host a CTF- Fix a slot and keep it. "First Saturday, 6–9 p.m." beats a random date every month. Members plan around it and attendance compounds.
- Make the first three challenges easy. A newcomer who solves one flag in the first 20 minutes comes back next month. One who solves nothing usually doesn't.
- Rotate challenge authors. Ask members who placed well last month to write one challenge for the next. It builds skill faster than playing alone.
- Close with a walkthrough. Spend the last 30 minutes on solutions, live or in a meetup, and link the writeups afterward.
- Track a season leaderboard. Sum points across monthly events and give the top three a shoutout on your socials.
- Invite a speaker quarterly. A short talk before the CTF brings in people who wouldn't show up for a competition alone.
Plan your next event with us
A free jeopardy event for up to 50 players goes live when you publish it. For flagship events, our team can build the challenges and run the managed formats: attack-defense, King of the Hill and SOC simulations.
