Registration, the app, exhibitors, badges. Each one bills per head.
A conference is one event made of several separate sales: delegates, exhibitors, sponsors, speakers. Most organisers rent a different product for each, and nearly all of them are priced on attendance.
What a conference organiser typically rents
Long contracts are common in this part of the industry, so the cost is often fixed years ahead on attendance you were only forecasting.
Priced on heads, signed for years
Per-registrant pricing sounds fair until you list who counts as a registrant. Speakers, press, exhibitor booth staff and sponsor guests may all pass through registration without paying you anything, and on some contracts each of them still carries a fee.
Multi-year agreements usually trade a lower rate for committed minimums. If attendance dips, the minimum does not. If you launch a second, smaller event, it often needs its own licence rather than sharing the first.
The quieter cost is rebuilding. When the app, the registration form and the exhibitor portal are separate products, the agenda is typed in more than once, and the exhibitor list lives in three places that drift apart by show week.
What we rebuild for a conference
- Registration with your pricing logicMember and non-member rates, early-bird deadlines, group bookings, day passes and invoices for delegates whose employer pays.
- Exhibitor portal and floor plan salesStand selection, contracts, invoices, booth staff names and the exhibitor manual deadlines in one place.
- Sponsor deliverablesWhat each package promised, what has been delivered, and what is still owed before doors open.
- Speakers and agendaSubmissions, review, scheduling, and one agenda that feeds the website and the on-site screens.
- Badge data and check-inClean badge output for your printer and scanning at the door from ordinary phones.
What we leave with specialists
- Card processingUnchanged. The processor's fee is the cost of taking cards, not of the registration software.
- Hotel room blocksBlocks and pickup reports live in the hotels' and housing bureaus' own systems. We can link to them; we do not replace them.
- Accreditation bodiesContinuing education credits are issued through the accrediting body's process. We record attendance in the form they ask for.
- Venue-mandated suppliersIf the venue requires its own supplier for badges, networking or lead capture hardware, that stands.
What happens between editions
A conference is an annual relationship sold as a one-off event. The valuable work happens between editions: exhibitors rebooking on the show floor, returning delegates offered their rate from last year, a sponsor's history visible to whoever takes over the account.
Rented event tools tend to treat each edition as a new project, and organisers end up doing year-on-year reporting by hand in spreadsheets. When you own the system, every edition is a row in the same database and the comparison is a report rather than a week of work.
Questions from conference teams
We are mid-contract with our registration platform. When should we start?
Start by reading the renewal clause, because the notice window is often months before the end date. The sensible pattern is to build during the final contracted edition and run the new system beside the old one on a smaller event or on exhibitor bookings first. You get a date with your quote.
Do complimentary passes and exhibitor staff cost extra?
No. Our price is one flat monthly figure that does not move with registrants, users or events, so there is nothing to count.
Can exhibitors still capture leads?
Yes. Scanning a badge to build a lead list is something we can build into the exhibitor portal using phones. If the venue or your contract requires a particular hardware supplier, that stays in place.
We only run one conference a year. Is custom software excessive?
It depends on the bill, not on the number of events. A single large conference on per-registrant pricing can cost more in software than a busy calendar of small ones. Work out the yearly and three-year totals first. If they are small, keep renting.
From the blog, for conferences and trade shows
- Source code handover: what a small business should ask forSeptember 28, 2026 · Five things to ask a developer for so another team could take over: repository access, accounts in your name, deployment notes, service logins and backups.
- What to ask before signing a multi-year SaaS contractSeptember 21, 2026 · Questions to ask before a multi-year SaaS contract: renewal and notice windows, price increases, minimums, shrinking, and data export when you leave.
Keep reading
Send us your registration and exhibitor bills
What each system costs per registrant or per show, and the parts your team actually uses.
Hiro costs about a tenth of what you pay now, quoted against your own bill. Hosting, fixes and changes included, and no per-seat fees.