We’ve Given Away Thousands of Dollars Celebrating the Developers Building With TheDogAPI

One of the things I genuinely love about running TheDogAPI is watching what people build with it.

We launched our monthly Discord competition a while back as a simple idea: give developers a reason to ship something, and reward the ones who do. Each month, members of our community submit apps they’ve built using the API, our community rallies around them, and we hand out prizes — $150 for first place, $75 for second, and sometimes even $50 for third.

We’ve now given away thousands of dollars in prizes. And every single time, I’m impressed by what comes in.

This month’s entries were a great example.

🥇 First place went to Jotham with Pawsitory — a personal media collection tool that lets users save their favourite pet content, pulling from both TheDogAPI and Pexels. It’s one of those ideas that makes you think “why hasn’t someone built this before?” Clean, original, and genuinely useful.

🥈 Second place went to DerekOS with Canine Cloud — a beautifully designed canine encyclopedia showcasing the full depth of our breed data. If you want to see what TheDogAPI looks like in the hands of someone who cares about UI, this is it.

🥉 Third place went to dreamer_paprika with K9-Recognition — which does something clever: click any dog image and it instantly surfaces breed details pulled directly from the API. Breed name, origin, life span, group. It’s a neat demonstration of how image data and breed data connect together in ways most developers don’t think to explore.

Want to enter next month?

The next competition kicks off next week and runs through to the end of April. Jump into our Discord and watch the #competitions channel for details. All you need is a public repo, a live page, and something built using one of our APIs.

We can’t wait to see what you build.

— Aden