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Data Bounty Program

On February 12, 2026, $6,500 was put up in total for this bounty program. Currently, $6,400 is up for grabs in exchange for Subway Builder data! Anyone who can get me country-wide high-resolution data recording where people live and work gets up to $500 per country.

Prize per country

  • $500: Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan
  • $250: Australia, Brazil, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain
  • $100: Argentina, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam

If you have data for a country not listed, email me and I'll let you know the bounty I'd pay, if any. All amounts are in US dollars.

Rules

  • You only win if I determine that the data you sent is of high enough quality to add to Subway Builder.
  • I must legally be allowed to use the data for Subway Builder.
  • There can only be one payout per country. The first person to send a valid submission wins the whole reward. Any prizes that have been paid out already will be recorded on this page.
  • The submission should have data for the entire country or at least all of its major metro areas in their entirety. Ex: If you get data for just Ontario instead of all of Canada you won't get the full award. If only partial data is available, I may be able to pay a partial bounty (email for details).
  • You can get paid with an Amazon gift card or an ACH bank transfer (however bank transfer may not be available for some countries). If you are in a sanctioned country or a country with difficult banking situation (eg. Russia, Iran, Cuba) I might not be able to pay you at all.
  • All entries must be submitted by April 1, 2026.

What the submission email must contain

1. Shapefile(s) that record where people live and where they work

The working part is usually the bottleneck. The data must contain both.

  • The shapefiles should be in the email as an attachment. If the file is too big to attach, upload the file to a hosting service like Google Drive and send me the link. Submissions that only link to the data source(s) won't qualify.
  • The employment and population data must be attatched to the shapes or points in the shapefile. Submissions with the data and shapes in seperate files won't qualify. Employment data and population data can be attatched to the same or seperate shapefiles but they both have to be attatched to a shapefile.
  • The shapefiles must be high resolution (at most a couple hundred meters between data points in urbanized areas). US Census block groups, census tracts, and census blocks are all good examples of geographies granular enough to qualify. Municipalities are an example of a geography that's not granular enough to qualify.
  • The shapefiles must be in .geojson, .kml, or .shp format and can't be unprojected.
  • Data should be from a decently reliable census count or something similar. Loose estimates (ex: data extrapolated from satellite imagery or OpenStreetMaps) will not qualify.
  • Data should be from 2020 at the earliest for residential data and 2022 for employment data. Older data may be eligible for a partial prize (email for details).

2. A link to the data source(s)

If the data was modified at all from the original source, you must detail how exactly the data was modified.

Any submission that doesn't contain both of these things will be quickly rejected.

Prizes Won

  • New Zealand - $100 (February 13, 2026)

For submissions or questions please email me at:
contact@subwaybuilder.com