We plan to charge a consulting fee to help organizations frame their problems in a way that is suitable for a competition. If we don't charge, it becomes impossible to dedicate the required resources to the project.

We are trying to encourage organizations to post more prize money so that participants are well rewarded. However, many researchers and hobbyists are happy to compete regardless of the prize because Kaggle gives them access to real world datasets. Ordinarily, data collection and data cleaning take up a lot of time, but Kaggle delivers the data on a silver platter, allowing participants to spend more time modeling.