In short. Price for commitment rather than for cost recovery. For a recurring business room, a charge that is felt but not deliberated does more for attendance than any reminder sequence, because an unused paid ticket is a small annoyance and an unused free one is nothing at all.
Most organisers price a networking event by adding up the venue and the catering, dividing by the expected numbers, and rounding. That produces a number that covers the costs of the people who turn up, which is not the same as a number that gets people to turn up.
The three jobs a price does
Cover costs. The obvious one, and for a recurring room usually the least interesting, because the costs are small and often sponsored.
Signal what kind of room it is. Price is read as a quality claim before anybody has any other information. A free event signals open, informal, and possibly full of people selling. A high price signals curated and senior, and it had better deliver that or the complaint will be severe.
Create commitment. The one that actually changes your attendance rate, and the one most organisers are not consciously using.
What free costs you
Free registration is the most expensive pricing decision available, and the cost is paid in no-shows.
A free ticket is made casually and abandoned casually. Nothing holds the person to it on the evening when the day has gone badly and it is raining. You will get more registrations and fewer attendees, you will over-cater, and the room will feel thinner than the list promised.
It is also a composition problem. A free room attracts people who are there to sell, because the cost of attending is zero and the upside of one sale is not, which is how rooms end up full of advisers with nobody to advise.
Free is the right answer sometimes: a launch, a sponsored event where the sponsor is explicitly buying the audience, a deliberately open community room, or anywhere a charge would exclude the people you most want. Choose it, do not default to it, and if you do choose it use a non-financial commitment device instead. How to reduce no-shows has the options.
The commitment band
The useful range is felt but not deliberated. Enough that an unused ticket is a small annoyance; not enough that anybody has to think about whether to buy it, check with anybody, or put it through expenses.
For a typical UK business audience that band is low, and well below what the event is worth. That is fine. You are not trying to capture value with the ticket price, you are trying to make the commitment real. If you need the revenue, sponsorship is a better instrument than the door.
We are not going to publish a specific figure, because the right number depends on your audience, your region and what else is on, and an invented benchmark would be worse than none. Two sanity checks instead: it should be less than the person would spend on lunch, and raising it should not change who comes, only how many of them turn up.
Member and non-member pricing
If you run a membership body, a differential is doing something more useful than discounting. It makes membership tangible at the moment of purchase, which is when people decide whether it was worth it, and it gives non-members a reason to ask about joining.
Keep the gap meaningful and the non-member price payable. A non-member price set high enough to be punitive protects the room at the cost of never growing it.
Early bird, which is not a discount
The job of early bird pricing is forecasting, not revenue. It pulls decisions forward so that three weeks out you know roughly what you are catering for and whether to push harder.
Two rules. Make the deadline real, because an extended early bird teaches everybody that your deadlines are fiction and next time they will wait. And make the gap small, because a large gap just means your standard price is decorative.
Refunds and transfers
Allow transfers freely and say so. A ticket passed to a colleague is a filled seat and a new person in your room, which is strictly better than a refund and an empty chair.
On refunds, a clear cut-off with easy cancellation before it is better than a no-refund policy, for the same reason covered elsewhere: you would rather have the seat back and the real number than a silent absence.
Do not price by looking at other events
The comparison is unreliable, because you cannot see the other event’s attendance rate, its sponsorship, or whether the room is actually any good. An event charging three times yours may be running at half capacity.
Price from your own room and your own numbers. If you are new, start in the commitment band, run it three times, and look at what your real attendance rate does rather than at what anybody else charges.
The number that tells you whether you got it right
Not revenue. Attendance against registration, over several events.
If that rate is low, your price is not creating commitment, whatever it is. If it is high and the room is thin, your problem is promotion rather than pricing. If it is high and the room is full, leave the price alone.
Related: how to reduce no-shows at a networking event, and how to get sponsors.