The KVR Developer Challenge closed on 11 August. A reverb called Scintillate took it. The results are worth reading, but the number sitting underneath them is worth reading harder, because it tells you how the small end of the plugin trade actually works.
13 August 2026. Every entry is still up on the challenge page and still free.
Scintillate is a reverb built by Sweet Audio, with the DSP from Signalsmith Audio. Windows and macOS, in VST3, AU and CLAP. KVR calls it a "Sparkle Engine", and for once the name does the job of a description: it grows sparkles inside the spectrum of an ordinary reverb, and you set how quickly they appear and how quickly they die off. Keep both gentle and it's a dusting over a piano. Push them and the tail turns into a fluttering wall of sound, or plays backwards.
Behind it, Maciel Audio took second with Vocal Box, a vocal mixing suite, and Darkpalace Studio came third with a delay called Parrot. The highest-placed sound library was Osiris Piano, from Karoryfer and Versilian Studios.
The challenge has one real stipulation. Whatever you enter has to be brand new, and it has to be free. That's it. So on 7 July, 56 plugins, apps and sound libraries appeared on a single page at the same time, and every one of them was a first release that nobody had heard of the week before.
Voting was meant to close on 3 August. KVR pushed it back a week, saying members had asked for more time to get through them all given what it called a record number of entries, and the results went up on 11 August instead.
The prize fund was $1,902.90. No sponsor put that up. It's donations, mostly from KVR members through PayPal, and it climbs daily while the contest runs. The winner takes 60 percent of it, second takes 20, third takes 10, and the top-placed sound library takes the last 10.
Which means the best new free plugin of the year, voted for by the people who use this stuff every day, earned its two developers somewhere near $1,140 between them.
That's not a dig at KVR. The fund is whatever the community decided to put in, and as goodwill goes it's a lot. But if you're thinking about writing plugins, look straight at that figure, because nobody enters this thing to get paid. They enter because one page carrying 56 free downloads is close to the only day in the year when a stranger will install something from a developer they've never heard of and actually give it ten minutes.
The payoff, when it comes, comes later. Sweet Audio has a 1.1.0 update to Scintillate lined up for the end of this month with more stability work and a new feature in it, and their first commercial plugin, Swell, is close to finished. The free reverb that's already sitting in a few thousand plugin folders is what will get Swell a fair hearing when it turns up.
All 56 entries are still on the challenge page and still free, though you download them one at a time. There's no bundle.
Sift through it and you'll find what you'd expect: a fair pile of first attempts, and then a handful of things that are genuinely good and that almost nobody will hear about again once the voting page goes quiet. That's the annoying part of this competition and also the reason to go looking. If you'd rather start from a shorter list of free plugins that have already proven themselves over years, we put one together two days ago.
We make plugins here too, so this is a familiar shape. Ours aren't free, but you can play every one of them in a browser before you spend anything, over on the demo pages.
We write these when there is something worth writing down. One email when a new one lands or a new Tunary instrument ships. No newsletter, no schedule.
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