CFP Radar: Tech Conference Call for Papers Finder & AI Matcher

What does CFP Radar do?

CFP Radar finds open calls for papers (CFPs) and calls for speakers at tech conferences and meetups, and uses AI to score how well each CFP fits your talk abstracts. Paste one or more abstracts, pick regions and a deadline window, and get a ranked list of conferences you can still submit to, with the deadline, event dates, location, online/hybrid format, speaker travel support, topics and a one-line reason for every match.

CFPs come from public Sessionize event pages and the open-source confs.tech conference list. The index is rebuilt every day, so closed CFPs drop out and new ones show up without you doing anything. Use it in Apify Console with no code, or as a CFP API from your own scripts.

Why use CFP Radar?

Finding the right conference to speak at usually means opening dozens of CFP pages, checking deadlines in different time zones and hunting for the travel and accommodation policy. CFP Radar does that for you:

• 🎯 AI talk matching: each CFP gets a 0–100 match score per abstract, and you see which of your abstracts fits best and why.
• ⏰ Deadline filter: only CFPs that are still open and close within your window. Deadlines without a time are treated as "anywhere on Earth", so nothing is hidden too early.
• 🌍 Region and online filter: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Oceania, or online (hybrid events count as online).
• ✈️ Travel support filter: keep only CFPs whose organizers cover or reimburse at least part of speaker travel or hotel.
• 🏷️ Topic filter: AI, web, Rust, Kubernetes, security, .NET, data and more. Common aliases work ("LLM" = AI, "k8s" = Kubernetes).
• 🔁 Deduplicated and merged: the same event listed in several places shows up once.
• 🤖 Apify platform features: run it on a schedule (for example every Monday), get results by API, or send them to Slack, email, Google Sheets, Make or Zapier with integrations.

Who uses it: conference speakers and developer advocates planning their speaking season, DevRel teams tracking where to send their engineers, and community organizers who want a list of open CFPs in their region.

What data does CFP Radar return?

Every result is one open CFP. The most useful fields:

Field	Description
conference	Conference or event name
cfpDeadline	CFP closing date (YYYY-MM-DD); cfpDeadlineAt has the exact UTC time when published
daysLeft	Whole days left until the CFP closes
eventDates	Event date, or "start to end" for multi-day events
location	"City, Country", "Online" or "Unknown"
online	true for online and hybrid events
travelSupport	yes, no or unknown (the CFP page doesn't say)
travelSupportDetails	What the organizers say about travel and accommodation
topics	Topic tags, e.g. ai, kubernetes, rust
matchScore	0–100 fit with your talk abstracts (or your topics)
matchReason	One-line reason for the score
bestMatchingAbstract	Number of your abstract that fits best (1 = first)
cfpUrl	Where to submit your talk
source	Where the CFP was found (sessionize or confs.tech)

Also included: eventUrl, format (in-person, online, hybrid), eventType (conference, meetup, workshop…), region, country, city, cfpStatus, cfpOpensAt and a short summary of what the CFP is looking for.

How to find conference CFPs that match your talk

1. Click Try for free and open the Input tab.
2. Paste your talk abstracts, one per entry (up to 10). Leave them empty to search by topics only.
3. Optionally add topics such as ai, web or kubernetes.
4. Pick regions (choose Online for remote and hybrid events) and set CFP deadline within (days).
5. Turn on Only CFPs with travel support if you need the organizer to help with travel.
6. Set Maximum results and click Start.
7. In about 15–30 seconds, open the Output tab: the best matches come first. Click cfpUrl to submit.

How much does it cost to find CFPs?

CFP Radar uses pay-per-event pricing: you pay $0.01 per CFP returned, plus a start fee of $0.00005 per run. There is no charge for compute time.

• A run with 10 results costs about $0.10, and 30 results (the default) about $0.30.
• Maximum results is a hard cap, so you always know the most a run can cost. Apify also stops charging when your run reaches the maximum cost you set.
• If a run fails (for example, when the AI service is down), it returns no results and you pay no result fees.

Apify's free plan includes monthly platform credit, which is enough for many CFP Radar runs.

Input

See the Input tab for every option. Example input:

{
    "talkAbstracts": [
        "Async Rust in production: how we moved a high-throughput payment service from Go to Tokio, what broke, and the patterns that made it reliable.",
        "Building an internal developer platform on Kubernetes: golden paths, self-service environments and measuring developer experience."
    ],
    "topics": [],
    "regions": ["Europe", "online"],
    "deadlineWithinDays": 120,
    "requireTravelSupport": false,
    "maxResults": 10,
    "minMatchScore": 40,
    "sortBy": "matchScore"
}

• Talk abstracts: a title plus 2–5 sentences works best. Each abstract is scored on its own.
• Minimum match score (default 40) drops weak matches. It only applies when you give abstracts, so a run can return fewer results than Maximum results when only a few CFPs really fit.
• Sort by: with abstracts, the best matches are picked first and "Deadline" only changes their order.

Output

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV or Excel, or view it as a table in the Output tab. Example results from the input above:

[
    {
        "conference": "Cloud Native Valencia",
        "cfpDeadline": "2026-10-29",
        "daysLeft": 17,
        "eventDates": "2026-11-25",
        "location": "Valencia, Spain (hybrid)",
        "online": true,
        "travelSupport": "unknown",
        "topics": ["cloud", "kubernetes", "devops", "open-source", "community"],
        "matchScore": 97,
        "matchReason": "Abstract 2: fits Cloud Native Valencia's Kubernetes-in-action focus and cloud-native best practices.",
        "bestMatchingAbstract": 2,
        "cfpUrl": "https://sessionize.com/cloud-native-valencia-2026/",
        "source": "sessionize"
    },
    {
        "conference": "CodeBuzz 2027",
        "cfpDeadline": "2026-11-15",
        "daysLeft": 34,
        "eventDates": "2027-06-02",
        "location": "Leipzig, Germany",
        "online": false,
        "travelSupport": "unknown",
        "topics": ["ai", "architecture", "cloud", "devops", "security", "testing"],
        "matchScore": 86,
        "matchReason": "Abstract 2: Platform engineering and Kubernetes-based developer platforms fit CodeBuzz 2027's focus on system architecture, cloud technologies, and DevOps/Platform Engineering.",
        "bestMatchingAbstract": 2,
        "cfpUrl": "https://sessionize.com/codebuzz-2027/",
        "source": "sessionize"
    }
]

Each run also saves a SUMMARY record in its key-value store with the index date, how many CFPs passed your filters and how many were scored by AI.

Use CFP Radar as an API

Call the Actor from any language with the Apify API. This request runs CFP Radar and returns the results in one call:

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 '{"topics": ["ai"], "regions": ["online"], "deadlineWithinDays": 30, "maxResults": 20}'

See the API tab for ready-made clients in JavaScript and Python. You can also run CFP Radar from AI assistants through the Apify MCP server.

Tips for better CFP matches

• Write abstracts the way you would submit them. Specific technologies and audiences ("Kubernetes platform teams", "React accessibility") match better than one-word topics.
• Combine topics and abstracts: topics filter the list first, then the AI scores what is left.
• Use a wide deadline window (90–180 days) when planning a whole season; big conferences close their CFPs months ahead.
• Schedule a weekly run and connect an integration to get new CFPs by email or Slack.

Related guides

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

FAQ

How does the AI match score work?

CFP Radar first compares your abstracts with every CFP that passes your filters using text embeddings, then asks an AI model to judge the closest candidates. The model scores each abstract on its own, and the final score combines both steps. 90–100 means the CFP is about your subject, 70–89 a strong fit, and 40–69 a partial fit such as a broad developer conference. Without abstracts, the score is the share of your topics the CFP covers.

Which CFP sources are covered?

Public event pages on Sessionize, a widely used call-for-speakers platform, and the community-maintained confs.tech list, which also links CFPs hosted elsewhere. Sources are crawled politely once a day.

How fresh is the data?

The CFP index is rebuilt every day. Each run only returns CFPs that are open at the moment you run it, and drops events that are already over.

What does travel support "unknown" mean?

The CFP page doesn't say whether the organizers pay for travel or hotel. Many CFPs don't mention it, so "unknown" is common. It is worth asking the organizers. "yes" means the page says they cover or reimburse at least part of it; check travelSupportDetails for what exactly.

Why did I get fewer results than I asked for?

Your filters may leave only a few open CFPs, or the AI found only a few that fit your abstracts well. Lower Minimum match score, widen the deadline window or add regions. You only pay for results you get.

Are my talk abstracts stored or shared?

Your abstracts are sent to the OpenAI API only to compute the match, and CFP Radar doesn't write them to its logs. Like every Apify run, your input stays in your own run storage, which you can delete at any time.

Is it legal to collect CFP data?

CFP Radar only reads public conference listings and CFP pages, and it returns event information, not speaker data. Our Actors are ethical and do not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. They only extract what the user has chosen to share publicly. We therefore believe that our Actors, when used for ethical purposes by Apify users, are safe. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data. Personal data is protected by the GDPR in the European Union and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers.

I found a wrong deadline or a missing conference. What can I do?

Open the Issues tab and tell us the conference and the CFP link. Feedback and feature requests are welcome there too.