Skip to main content

← All use cases

I. Hackathon & education

24-hour hackathon backend

A team provisions Postgres + Mongo + S3-compatible storage anonymously, ships their demo, and lets the stack expire 24 hours after judging.

Prompt for any LLM (no setup needed)

Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — no MCP, no API key, no install:

Read https://instanode.dev/llms.txt for the API.

I want to: a team provisions Postgres + Mongo + S3-compatible storage anonymously, ships their demo, and lets the stack expire 24 hours after judging.

Write a complete runnable script (bash + whatever language fits) that: - Provisions the services I need (Postgres + MongoDB + S3-compatible storage) from instanode.dev - Does the work above end-to-end - Prints expected output at each step - Tells me how to claim the resources at the end if I want to keep them past 24 hours

Use real curl commands against api.instanode.dev. Quote the actual response shapes from llms.txt. ```

Sample agent prompt

You're scaffolding a 24-hour hackathon project. Provision a Postgres for users + submissions, a MongoDB for unstructured judge feedback, and a S3-compatible bucket for demo videos — all anonymously, no signup. Wire them into a Next.js app, deploy a demo, and stop worrying about cleanup since the stack auto-expires 24 hours after we provision.

Steps to follow

  • Step 1: Claim three anonymous resources in parallel. One curl per service, no auth, no account.

``bash curl -sX POST https://api.instanode.dev/db/new -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name":"24-hour-hackathon-backend-db"}' > pg.json & curl -sX POST https://api.instanode.dev/nosql/new -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name":"24-hour-hackathon-backend-mongo"}' > mongo.json & curl -sX POST https://api.instanode.dev/storage/new -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name":"24-hour-hackathon-backend-storage"}' > s3.json & wait ``

  • Step 2: Export connection strings to the dev shell. Each response has connection_url and expires_at.

``bash export DATABASE_URL=$(jq -r .connection_url pg.json) export MONGO_URL=$(jq -r .connection_url mongo.json) export S3_URL=$(jq -r .connection_url s3.json) ``

  • Step 3: Create the submissions schema. Standard Postgres, real DB.

``sql CREATE TABLE submissions ( id uuid PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT gen_random_uuid(), team text NOT NULL, video_key text, submitted_at timestamptz DEFAULT now() ); ``

  • Step 4: Upload demo videos to S3-compatible storage. S3-compatible, works with any AWS SDK.

``bash aws --endpoint-url "$S3_URL" s3 cp demo.mp4 s3://instant-shared/team42/demo.mp4 ``

  • Step 5: Ship and forget. All three resources delete themselves at expires_at (T+24h). No teardown script, no abandoned infra in someone's AWS account.

Why this works on instanode.dev

Hackathons die from cleanup debt — nobody remembers to tear down the RDS instance after Saturday night. The anonymous tier hands you real Postgres, Mongo, and S3 in one second each, then garbage-collects itself after 24 hours. Three curl calls replace three signup flows, three credit cards, and three Terraform configs.