In short. Most event networking platforms charge the organiser a per-event or annual licence fee, commonly quoted on application and typically running from four figures per event upwards. The Gantry charges event owners nothing and charges attendees £15 a month inc VAT for the full version.
Ask an event networking platform what it costs and you will usually be asked how many attendees you have, and then offered a call. The number arrives later, scoped to your event, and is difficult to compare with anybody else’s.
That is not an accident. Per-event licensing means the price can follow the size of your budget rather than the cost of serving you.
The three models in this market
Per-event licence. You pay for the platform for the duration of one event, usually banded by attendee count. This is the dominant model for conference and trade show platforms. It suits a large annual conference with a real budget line and suits a monthly chamber breakfast very badly, because the fee does not scale down to a room of forty people.
Annual subscription. A platform fee covering a number of events a year. Better value if you run a lot of events, and a reason to keep running them on one platform. Worse if your programme is irregular.
Attendee-side subscription. The organiser pays nothing and the attendee chooses whether to upgrade. Rare in event software, normal in professional networks.
What this costs the organiser of a small room
The thing that gets missed in the per-event model is that most business networking in the UK is not a conference. It is a breakfast with thirty people in it, run monthly, often by a chamber or a BID or one determined person. At that size, a per-event licence is more than the room takes in ticket revenue, so the organiser does not buy software at all. They use a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a printed list.
So the economics of the market push the tooling towards the events that need it least. The 500-person conference already has a programme, an app and a team. The thirty-person room, where a bad evening means nobody speaks to anybody new, has nothing.
What The Gantry charges
We went the other way, on purpose.
Event owners pay nothing. No per-event fee, no listing allowance to run out, no analytics subscription, no trial that expires. Listing a Room, uploading a delegate list, granting every delegate the full room for your event and reading the analytics are all free.
Attendees pay £15 a month inc VAT for Premium Membership, and most never do. The free tier shows you 30% of the Rooms on the platform and 30% of the people in any Room you join, with 2 nudges per event. That is a real slice, not a locked door, and it is enough to decide whether a room is worth your evening.
Delegates pay nothing either. When an organiser adds you to their delegate list, that room opens completely for you: the whole attendee list rather than a third of it, from 14 days before the event until 7 days after. Your allowances do not change, so it is still 2 nudges and 2 post-event connection requests. What changes is that you can see who you are spending them on.
Why that way round
Two reasons, and the second is the honest one.
The first is that the organiser is not the person getting the value. A good introduction is worth something to the two people in it. Charging the organiser for other people’s outcomes means the price has to be justified by a report at the end, which is why so much event software is sold on dashboards.
The second is distribution. Free for organisers means more Rooms, and more Rooms is what makes the product worth paying for as an attendee. A per-event fee would slow that down at exactly the stage where we need it not to.
Questions that get you a straight answer from any vendor
If you are comparing platforms, these four are the ones people avoid:
- What is the total cost for one event of my size, including setup and support, with no annual commitment?
- Does the price change if attendance doubles on the day?
- What happens to my delegate data if I do not renew?
- Can my attendees use it for free, and what do they get if they do not pay?
Any vendor who answers all four plainly is worth talking to.