Badges sell a year out. The fee is taken the day they sell.
Gaming and anime conventions, comic and tabletop shows, collegiate and grassroots esports leagues all run the same pattern: a large share of the money arrives months before the doors open, and a different rented tool looks after each part of what was promised.
What a convention or a league usually rents
The badge platform is the one everybody can name. The rest of the stack was bought by whichever department needed it, and is often billed to a different card.
A fee charged at the sale, on an event a year away
Selling early is good business, and this pricing model quietly penalises it. The fee is taken the moment a badge sells, on a show you have not yet delivered, and it can be taken again on an upgrade where the upgrade is processed as a fresh purchase. The longer your on-sale runs ahead of the doors, the more of your incoming cash is already spoken for while every cost of the show is still in front of you.
Then count who is registered but paying nothing. Staff, volunteers, guests, press, panellists, exhibitor booth staff and contest entrants all need a badge, and on some agreements each of them is a registration like any other. A show can be paying a per-head fee on a sizeable part of the hall that never bought anything, which is worth checking in your own terms before the next on-sale.
Fragmentation costs more than the fees do. A panellist is a badge holder, a programme item and quite often a volunteer, held in three systems that share nothing, so the week before the show goes on cross-checking lists by hand. When a badge changes hands in one place nothing else is told, and the people on the registration desk find out at the desk.
What we rebuild for a con or a league
- Badge tiers and a pre-registration ladderTiers and price steps that open a year out, upgrades that charge the difference instead of a refund and a rebuy, group orders for a room of friends, instalments, and add-ons such as contest entry or a signing ticket in the same basket.
- Name changes, deferrals and resaleA badge bought in one year that can move to another person or another edition on your rules, with a resale route you run yourself so the second-hand trade happens somewhere you can see it.
- Programming, guests and contestsPanel submissions with review and scoring, cosplay contest and guest sign-ups, scheduling into rooms and slots, and one grid that feeds the website, the printed programme and the signage.
- Dealer hall and artist alley with a juryApplications, a scored jury round your team can run without a spreadsheet, waitlists, booth allocation on the hall map, invoices, and booth staff badges attached to the booth rather than to a person's inbox.
- Brackets and check-in for your own eventsTeam rosters with substitutes, seeding, check-in windows that open and close on time, and standings that publish themselves, for the tournaments you operate rather than the ones a publisher runs.
What we leave rented
- Publisher and platform tournament systemsWhere a game publisher operates the ladder, the accounts, the anti-cheat or a licensed competition, that is the network and the rulebook at once, and it stays. We hold your rosters and your check-in; the matches run where they have to.
- Hotel room blocksBlocks, rates and pickup reports belong to the hotels and the housing bureaus. We link attendees to them and record who has booked; we do not replace them.
- Card processingThe processor's rate applies whoever sells the badge. We connect to the one you already use.
A badge sold today is a promise for next year
By the time the doors open, much of your audience bought in a different year, under a different name on the order, with a different email address and possibly a different set of friends to sit with. That is the real operational problem of a convention and it is not a ticketing problem. It is a ledger: who holds what, what has changed hands, what was upgraded, what was deferred from the last edition, and which of those promises is still owed on the Friday morning.
It also changes what a difficult announcement looks like. If a date moves or a headline guest pulls out, you need to know at once how many badges are affected, what each of them paid and what your terms say, without a week of exports and cross-referencing. Owning that ledger is what lets you offer a rollover to the next edition as an ordinary option rather than an emergency, which is usually cheaper for you and better received than a refund.
Questions con and league organisers ask
Can attendees change the name on a badge or roll it to next year?
Yes, on your rules. A name change, a transfer to a friend and a rollover to the next edition can each have their own window and their own fee, applied by the system and reflected on the door list immediately. The badge stops being a piece of paper that gets argued over at the registration desk.
Do we still run tournaments on the publisher's platform?
Where a publisher operates the competition, yes, and nothing about that changes. What we build is your side of it: sign-ups, team rosters and substitutes, check-in windows, seeding and the standings you publish. For the grassroots and collegiate brackets you run yourselves, that can be the whole tournament.
Where do hotel room blocks fit?
They stay with the hotels and the housing bureau. We can link from your badge confirmation to the block and record who has booked, which is enough to watch your pickup against the room nights you committed to, without pretending to be a housing system.
We are a small con or a college league. Should we build our own?
Probably not yet, and we would rather say so now. If one badge platform covers you and its fee is modest, keep renting. Add the badge fees to the panel tool, the application forms, the bracket platform and the volunteer scheduler across a full year with the calculator on this site. If the total is small, stay where you are.
From the blog, for esports and fan conventions
- What do badges sold a year ahead mean for name changes and deferrals?September 28, 2026 · Badge tiers sold a year in advance make name changes, transfers and deferrals ordinary events rather than exceptions. What each one has to decide, and where the cost sits.
- How are artist alley and dealer hall applications with a jury usually handled?September 28, 2026 · For most shows it is a form tool, a scoring spreadsheet and invoices raised elsewhere. Where the cost actually sits, and what a jury round needs from software.
Keep reading
Send us what a badge costs you
The fee on each badge, roughly how many badges a year, and the separate tools behind programming, dealers, brackets and volunteers.
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.