Unlike other event tech providers, we’re not shy in telling you just how much our solution is based on your event size.
As organizers ourselves, we were frustrated by having to “contact sales to discover pricing”. Whenever we see this, we cringe. We know that we’re going to talked into something by some slick sales person promising their platform can do everything we need and more, only to be hit with a price tag we can’t afford.
Had they been upfront and told us that their solution would cost us $15,000, we wouldn’t have wasted our or their time on a tech demo that was out of our price range, even if it was exactly what we needed.
When we launched Just Attend, we did so with complete transparency. We wanted you to know upfront how much you’d be charged for your event with us.
If it puts you off booking your demo, that’s great for both of us!
This isn’t because we don’t care about you, not at all. We just don’t want you in our position where you see everything you need and more, but ultimately at the end of it all we cannot come to an agreement on price. It’s just not good for either of us.
With that said, we do feel we offer the best value event platform on the market at a price tag that is cheaper than anyone else.
We know it can be confusing to understand what event tech costs, what features are included, what are add-on costs, and those super secret transaction fees that ‘slipped’ the mind of the salesperson to mention.
So, we want to break down our pricing and compare it to the alternatives on the market so you have a clearer idea of how much value for money we really are.
Understanding Our Pricing Model
We offer a simple pricing model based based on your event size. We offer plans that are suited to annual events and others that are suited to event companies who run multiple events per year.
Our per event plans are based on the number of registrations you’re expecting at your event, while the event company plans are priced by how many events you’re running a year.
Within these plans there are no feature restrictions. We don’t sell software add-ons. All features you see on our website and demo platform are available in all plans, whether you end up using them or not.
Our per event plans start from free. We don’t mean free trial, we mean free. If your event is less than 50 people, you can use our platform for your event without owing us a cent. If you run 20 events with each less than 50 people, then these are all free.
You only start paying when you exceed this number. When you do, you can upgrade through each plan level as your event grows, so you end up paying a fair price for the amount you’re using the platform.
How Is This Fair?
You might think paying more to use the features you already have access to seems unfair. After all what are you getting for the extra money you’re now having to pay us?
We can empathize with you. However, the larger your event grows, the more you, your attendees, speakers, and exhibitors rely on our platform and services. You as organizers will start to use more of the features you hadn’t previously used. The platform will be getting used more by your users, more transactions, more emails, all increase the cost of operation.
In addition, the larger your event, the more reliance you’re going to place upon us to support your event. Something we are more than happy to do, but this takes employees time, and they cost money.
We like to think we offer a fair balance between cost and value so you get the best possible return on your investment in us.
Hidden Fees
So many times we find other event tech providers fail to disclose the hidden costs of their platform. Whether that is having to pay more to access a feature, or transaction fees on e-commerce purchases like tickets and exhibitor infrastructure add-ons.
A great example of this was from one of our customers who signed up to a competitor platform to host their events for a year.
At $1,500 for the event platform which included session agenda, mobile app, exhibitor promotion, and attendee engagement for up to 1,500 attendees seemed a great deal.
Only afterwards when they wanted to use the platform to sell tickets did they realize they would be charged $20,000 in transaction fees based on their ticket price.
This forced them to look for an alternative solution for their ticket sales.
Some competitors charge up to 8% commission on e-commerce transactions which can seriously impact your bottom line. Some withhold your revenue until after your event has passed before paying out, others withhold a sizeable percentage between 20 and 40% depending on who you choose.
These are the details that you won’t really find out when you sign-up, but they can have serious impacts on your ability to host your event.
With us there are no hidden fees. Zero. Zilch. If you sell tickets or offer e-commerce purchases you use your own payment gateway and you pay those fees which are already known to you. We don’t take a commission on top of our platform cost.
How Our Pricing Compares To Whova
In 2019, our founder used Whova for their event. At that time it was a single event with no more than 400 attendees anticipated. The price paid for the platform was $2,200 which worked out at $5.50 per attendee.
They wanted to sell tickets to their event at $200 per ticket. To access the Whova registration module was a commission fee based on the value of the ticket price.
We can’t remember what this was back in 2019, but today’s fee is 3% plus $0.99c per ticket would cost $2,796 on top bringing the total to $4,996 or $12.49 per attendee.
The comparable cost for our platform for 400 attendees would place us in our Sprout plan at $3,750 or $9.36 per attendee.
We don’t process payments on your behalf, so you’re free to use any payment gateway you want e.g. Go Cardless.
With Go Cardless they charge 1% plus $0.25c per transaction. So using the same calculation as before would cost a total of $1,130 in fees. When added to our platform cost, the total cost you’d end up paying would be $4,880 or $12.20 per attendee.
Ok, so saving $116 verses Whova doesn’t seem like a compelling reason to switch. However, don’t forget, our platform offers a ton of features Whova doesn’t that you would have to find alternative solutions for.
Additional Software Required
Call for Content and speaker self service session management. Although Whova offers basic Call for Content features (as of Sept 2024), for events that rely heavily on content submissions from their community you’d need a more robust solution like LineUp Ninja.
LineUp Ninja charge per speaker annually. For 100 speakers, their platform cost is $4,000.
We don’t actually charge any fee for call for content, you can run your entire call for speakers on our platform before crossing the registration payment threshold. This means you could create your entire event agenda for free.
In feature capability comparison, we provide the same capabilities as LineUp Ninja including automated communications to Speakers, content distribution, digital signage, drag and drop scheduling, clash detection, and rules based session scheduling.
Total saved by using Just Attend so far: $4,116.
LineUp Ninja doesn’t have a mobile app so relies on integrations to other platforms that have attendee agenda creation capabilities such as entegy and grip.
One of the biggest problems with Whova is that everyone needs to use the Whova mobile app. Not using it essentially excludes the attendee from any form of participation. In our events over 85% of attendees engage in the event without using a mobile app, instead relying on our responsive event portal.
As an organizer using Whova, you’ll need to invest time in communications to ensure that as many of your attendees as possible download the app, otherwise they’re not going to be able to leave feedback.
This might force you to consider using another system for capturing session feedback.
Maybe you’ll look at something like eventify which costs from $1,427 per event.
With Just Attend you can create your own feedback surveys for sessions and your event as a whole. Attendees can leave their feedback using our mobile app and our responsive event portal website inclusive of your platform cost.
Total saved by using Just Attend so far: $5,573.
If you’re using Whova then you’ll know their event app also allows exhibitors to create virtual booths within the app and scan leads. That’s great, so do we! But unlike Whova, we also display those virtual booths on your web event portal to attendees and prospective attendees.
If an exhibitor is speaking, attendees will see their session in their booth, whereas Whova won’t. We also allow each exhibitor to upload brochures and integrate their corporate meeting booking system so that attendees can get in touch with them and find out more about what they do.
We also have a better self-service event portal for each exhibitor where they can manage their staff, view their leads, create custom lead qualification questions, track their assignable tasks, read your exhibitor manual, and a whole lot more.
Whilst not a direct saving verses Whova, we believe we offer better value and a better experience for exhibitor managers and attending staff.
You might now be thinking, exhibitor task management is something you need. Making sure that exhibitors complete all required tasks from uploading health and safety or insurance documents to completing activity tasks needed to ensure they are ready to exhibit.
Whova doesn’t have this feature, but you could use a ffair. Ffair allows you to assign tasks to exhibitor staff and track their completions. They charge $9 per user per year. They determine a user as anyone with a task assigned to them.
At our event we have 50 exhibitors. If each exhibitor had one user assigned a task, this would cost us $450.
This isn’t a huge cost, but many exhibitors will have multiple event managers who need access to systems in order to complete their tasks. The license cost can be a bottleneck for the exhibitor where only one specific person at that exhibitor can track and update tasks. What if they’re on holiday when a critical task is due?
With Just Attend, exhibitor task management is included by default. We don’t charge a license fee and any exhibitor manager can view and complete tasks assigned to their company account.
Total saved by using Just Attend so far $6,023.
Having all the event tech in place to manage your event is just part of the puzzle. You need to communicate with your exhibitors, speakers, and attendees. You need to publish event manuals, notices, and information about attending such as travel, parking, and check-in processes etc.
Now you’re using Whova and other apps you might find you need to duplicate some or all of this content into each place an attendee could potentially require it as well as your event marketing website.
With Just Attend, you can upload this information in one place and it is instantly available on our event portal and mobile app, right where the attendee needs to see it.
With all this information at your attendee and exhibitor fingertips it can be overwhelming for them to find the right information they need quickly. Perhaps they’re travelling or pre-occupied and need to find answers about your event quickly.
They could reach out by posting in a forum in the Whova app. But you might not see it, you might be busy too. You may have answered the same question 100 times previously too.
So you look for better ways for attendees to find the answers they need quickly and without you being responsible for answering each question. You look for an event aware artificial intelligence chat bot such as eventumbot that can ingest your event information and provide answers to your attendees on your behalf.
Implementing eventumbot on your website will cost you $1,050 and can be a real time saver for you and your attendees.
But with us a Just Attend, you get Jeronimo, our event aware AI bot that will do just the same included in your chosen plan.
Jeronimo will be able to answer any question based on the information you add to your event from tickets, sessions, speakers, exhibitors, event manuals, information posts, and previous questions you’ve already answered.
Unlike other platforms where you need to connect in your data sources, Jeronimo ‘just works’.
Total saved by using Just Attend so far: $7,073.
Now we’re into the day of your event and you need to start thinking about attendee check-in and badge printing.
Whova has a built-in badge designer where you can design your badges and create PDF files with variable data from its registration database.
However, this requires you to print your badges in advance of your event. This might be fine for events under 100 attendees, but any larger and this process isn’t scalable.
Whova does allow you export your registration data to CSV, so you can provide this to your chosen onsite badge printing partner and they can use their software, equipment, and people to handle this for you.
For a 1-day, 400 person event we were quoted $5,640 back in 2019.
Using Just Attend, you can run your own onsite badge printing solution using our software for no extra software charge.
You can use laptops you might already own, or purchase low cost computers, a label printer, and a QR code scanner. You can build your own badge printing kiosk station for less than $800.
Our check-in and badge printing solution is lightweight, resilient to internet outages, and fast. It can scan a ticket, validate, check-in, and print a badge in less than 5 seconds. It is completely hands-free, all attendees need to do is walk up and scan their ticket.
For a 400 person event, 2 check-in stations are needed at a cost of $1,600 and they can be monitored by volunteer staff that are already at your event.
Of course you can still design the badges you want in any badge size your printer supports. We can even design the badge for you for free and supply you with the badge media and lanyards at very competitive prices.
Grand Total saved by using Just Attend: $11,113.
Summary
As we’ve hopefully demonstrated, our pricing is not expensive. In fact, we’re probably under-charging you. But that’s OK, we’re here to make your life easier and for you to benefit from increased profit margins in your event budget.
But does cheapness come at a price?
Not in our case. Unlike our larger competitors we have very little company overheads beyond our employees wages. For this reason we can afford to offer the best prices in the industry that no one else can get close to without compromising on our service.
We pride ourselves on being a value first technology provider. Your customer satisfaction and experience comes first in at all times.
When you join Just Attend, you’ll get your very own Event Success Manager who you can call upon any time you need. Whether you want to find out how to do something, need some help and support managing the platform, or just want to blow off steam with a general chat. Your ESM will be there on the phone, by chat, or e-mail for you.
We also provide unrivalled event support. Unlike our competitors who’ll disappear behind shared inboxes and ‘online universities’ after they’ve got your money, we take your event 1st line support calls.
If your attendees, exhibitors, or speakers have questions about how to use our platform, or have problems with it, they contact us through our live chat on your event website. We handle the call from start to finish. You don’t need to be the middle-man support person.
If you’d like to chat more about how we can help you save money and what a technology partner should be like, then book a demo with us today.
