Challenge Policy & Pricing

Grand Challenge is an open-source platform built and maintained by researchers for researchers. It enables the end-to-end development of cutting-edge AI algorithms for a broad range of medical imaging problems and contributes to open, fair, and reproducible science.

The majority of features on our platform can be used free of charge. Challenges, Reader Studies, and Algorithms, however, are compute- and storage-intensive and incur costs that we as a research group with limited resources and funding cannot cover alone. With a growing user base and an increasing number of Challenges, Algorithms, and Reader Studies running in parallel, our development team also spends a considerable amount of time on the maintenance and further development of the platform to ensure a successful and smooth challenge experience.

To make sure that we have enough resources to maintain and keep developing Grand Challenge as a unique resource for the research community, we ask organizers of challenges to contribute to both the cost of running the challenge on our platform and the open-source development of features of the platform. We may also request contributions to users for running Reader Studies and Algorithms at scale.

We operate with a base cost of 5000 euros per challenge per calendar year, plus a capacity reservation for compute time and storage in our AWS backend. The base cost is used to fund platform maintenance and development as well as additional infrastructure costs for keeping your challenge running long-term. The capacity reservation charges are variable and differ per challenge. An estimate of those costs is calculated as part of our challenge request procedure. Capacity reservations are non-refundable and expire in the same calendar year as the date of issue of the invoice.

If a challenge ends up exceeding their capacity reservation, we reserve the right to reduce the costs, for example, by limiting the number of submissions allowed or closing the challenge.

Challenge requests occasionally lead to requests for new features. We are happy to add new features to our platform that will benefit our users. We will estimate the cost of implementing new features and discuss if you would be able to provide funding or assist in the implementation. We also welcome contributions to the open-source codebase that underlies the platform.

We realize that a lot of our users are academics themselves and might have limited funding available. Organizing a Challenge, deploying Algorithms, and doing Reader Studies are activities that are nowadays often part of funded research projects. We are open to partnering in and consulting for such research projects; in this way reasonable funding can be allocated. We are also open to long-term partnerships with academic institutions, research groups, and other organizations, e.g., conferences, interested to use grand-challenge.org to run challenges, to jointly further develop and maintain grand-challenge.org. Please get in touch with us to discuss the options.