Collaborators

Yes, you can do group projects. A project can have one owner plus up to 4 collaborators, so 5 people total can build on the same Macondo project. The owner shares an invite code, teammates join with it, and everyone can write journals, edit the project, and submit it for review.

What a collaborator is

A collaborator is a friend you add to your project so you can build it together. Once they join, they get almost full access: they can do everything except delete the project and manage the team.

The owner is whoever created the project. The project, its history, and the fruit it earns live under the owner's account. That's the one thing collaborators can't change, so pick the owner with that in mind.

How do I add a collaborator?

The owner invites people with an invite code. Here is the flow:

Open your project page and find the Collaborators section (click the header to expand it).
Click Invite a collaborator. A panel shows your project's invite code.
Share it. You can Copy code to send the raw code, or Copy link to send a ready-to-click join link (it points to /join/{code}).
Your teammate opens the link (or enters the code), signs in, and clicks Join project. They land straight onto the project as an active collaborator.

That's it. There is no pending or accept step on your side: once they redeem the code, they're in.

Invite codes are owner-managed

Only the owner can see, generate, or rotate the invite code. Rotating the code makes the old one stop working, which is handy if you shared it too widely.

One important detail: each invite code works once. The moment a teammate joins, the code rotates to a fresh one automatically. To add another teammate, open the Invite panel again and share the new code. This keeps a code from being passed around to people you didn't mean to invite.

What can collaborators do?

A collaborator can do almost everything the owner can. They can:

Write and edit journal entries
Edit the project title, description, repository, and demo links
Link Hackatime projects and view the hours breakdown
View and edit guide code, and download the project
Submit the project for review and see its place in the review queue

A few actions stay owner-only:

Viewing, generating, or rotating the invite code
Removing a collaborator from the project
Deleting the project

How do rewards and ships work?

Anyone on the team can hit submit, and the ship itself is attributed to the owner. The gold, though, is shared: when a ship is approved, its gold is split across the team by hours worked, and each teammate's share lands directly in their own account. (If nobody has Hackatime hours tracked on the project, the gold is split evenly instead.)

The project's fruit is the project's own tier, so it grows on the project and stays with it under the owner's account, alongside the rest of the project's history. Collaborators' journals still show up under their own name in the Collaborators section. It's worth agreeing up front on how you'll divide the work, but the gold payout is split for you by the hours each person logged.

For hardware projects, funding is the exception: a parts grant is not split between teammates. When a group build is approved for a parts grant, the entire grant goes to one person, the project owner, who spends it on parts for the build. Hardware funding is based on the build cost rather than hours worked, so there's no per-person share. Decide who's placing the orders before you submit, and make that person the owner.

Hardware funding is not split

A $500 build grant goes to the owner in full to buy parts, not $250 each. If two of you are building together, settle who owns the project and receives the grant before you ship the design.

How do I leave or remove someone?

Both happen from the same Collaborators section:

Collaborators can leave a project from their own card.
The owner can remove any collaborator from their card.

Leaving or removing doesn't delete any journals or work already done. It just ends that person's access going forward, so nothing they built is lost.

One thing to know: team changes are paused while a ship is under review. If the project has a ship in the queue, leaving and removing are blocked until the review finishes, so the crew doesn't change while a reviewer is deciding the payout. Once the review is done, you can leave or remove as normal.

Limit is 4 collaborators

A project tops out at the owner plus 4 collaborators. If you've hit the cap and want to bring in someone new, an existing collaborator needs to leave (or be removed) first.