MessNoMore Data Tools › Open Call for Papers at Tech Conferences: Where to Find Them

Where can I find tech conferences with an open call for papers, including CFPs that cover speaker travel?

Updated 2026-10-14 · By Wong Xian Qi

Open calls for papers at tech conferences are listed on Sessionize, a widely used call-for-speakers platform, and on confs.tech, a community-maintained conference list that also links CFPs hosted elsewhere. Checking which of them are still open, and which pay for speaker travel, means opening many CFP pages one by one. The CFP Radar Actor reads both sources every day, so one API call returns the CFPs that are still open, filtered by deadline, region, topic and travel support.

Where can I find tech conferences with an open call for papers?

• Sessionize. Public event pages live at sessionize.com/<event-slug>/, and Sessionize's own events sitemap lists them. A CFP page shows when the call closes and, if the organizers list them, speaker benefits such as travel and accommodation.
• confs.tech. Its data is open JSON in the tech-conferences/conference-data repository on GitHub (MIT license), one file per topic and year. Each entry has the name, dates, city, country, an online flag and, when a CFP is open, a CFP link and end date.
• Everything else. Some CFPs sit on pretalx, PaperCall, a form tool or the conference's own website. confs.tech sometimes links to them.

Why is finding the right CFPs by hand slow?

• Deadlines. Organizers work in different time zones, and some give only a date. CFP Radar treats a date without a time as "anywhere on Earth", so a CFP is not hidden while it is still open somewhere.
• Travel policy. It is a line in the CFP text or a speaker-benefits section, and many CFPs do not mention it at all.
• Stale pages. Organizers sometimes leave the CFP page of a past event open, and deadlines get extended or closed early.
• Duplicates. The same event can be listed in several places.

How do I list open CFPs with travel support through an API?

Set requireTravelSupport to true and pick deadlineWithinDays (1 to 365, default 60). You can add regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Oceania or online; hybrid events count as online) and topics such as rust, ai or kubernetes. Closed CFPs are never returned.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/messnomore~cfp-radar/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"requireTravelSupport": true, "deadlineWithinDays": 60, "sortBy": "deadline", "maxResults": 20}'

The field travelSupport is yes, no or unknown. yes means the CFP says the organizers cover or reimburse at least part of travel or accommodation; free tickets, meals and swag do not count. It is taken from the speaker benefits where Sessionize lists them; otherwise an AI model reads the page text, so confirm details with the organizers. These rows come from a run on 2026-10-14. The data changes daily, so some deadlines here have passed.

One full result from the same run:

{
  "conference": "PHP Tek 2027",
  "cfpDeadline": "2026-10-31",
  "cfpDeadlineAt": "2026-11-01T04:59:00.000Z",
  "daysLeft": 17,
  "eventDates": "2027-04-27 to 2027-04-29",
  "location": "Chicago, United States",
  "online": false,
  "travelSupport": "yes",
  "travelSupportDetails": "travel: expenses covered; accommodation: expenses covered",
  "topics": ["php", "leadership", "career"],
  "cfpUrl": "https://sessionize.com/php-tek-2027/",
  "eventUrl": "https://phptek.io/",
  "source": "sessionize",
  "format": "in-person",
  "eventType": "conference",
  "region": "North America",
  "country": "United States",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "cfpStatus": "open",
  "cfpOpensAt": "2026-06-01",
  "summary": "PHP Tek 2027 seeks talks from PHP developers and tech leaders, focusing on leadership, expertise, and networking, with speakers encouraged to submit multiple ideas."
}

How often does the CFP list change?

The index is rebuilt every day, and each run returns only CFPs that are open at that moment. Open Sessionize pages are re-checked about once a week by default, so a deadline an organizer extends or closes early can take a few days to show up.

Can it rank CFPs by how well they fit my talk?

Yes. Paste up to 10 talk abstracts (4,000 characters each). The Actor compares them with every CFP that passes your filters using text embeddings, an AI model judges the closest candidates, and each result gets a matchScore from 0 to 100 and a one-line reason. 90 to 100 means the CFP is about your subject, 70 to 89 a strong fit, 40 to 69 a partial fit. In the sample run, an abstract about moving a high-throughput service to Tokio scored 91 for TokioConf 2027 in Portland, United States (CFP deadline 2026-11-30).

How much does it cost?

Pricing is pay-per-event: $0.01 per CFP returned plus a start fee of $0.00005 per run, with no charge for compute time. A run with 10 results costs about $0.10 and one with 30 results (the default maximum) about $0.30. maxResults is a hard cap on the cost, and a failed run returns no results and no result fees. Apify Bronze, Silver and Gold subscribers get lower prices.

What does it not cover?

• CFPs are discovered only through public Sessionize event pages and the confs.tech list. A CFP hosted elsewhere and listed on neither is not found.
• Pages that confs.tech links to are read for details, except PaperCall and form-tool pages, so travel support stays unknown for those CFPs.
• Tech events only: an event listed only on Sessionize is left out when the AI finds no technology focus.
• No submissions. Each result has a cfpUrl where you submit your talk, and it returns event information, not speaker data.
• unknown travel support means the CFP page does not say. It is worth asking the organizers.

Which ready-made examples can I run?

• Find open Rust conference CFPs
• Find open Python and AI conference CFPs
• Find tech conference CFPs that cover speaker travel
• Find open CFPs for tech conferences in Europe
• Match your talk abstract to open conference CFPs