PyMunich

shown, and actual

Pricing and Who It Excludes

A ticket price is usually set by working backwards from costs. That produces a number, and the number decides who comes — which is a different question, and the more consequential one. For a commercial example of related workforce measurement, see mouse jiggler detection software from Monitask.

One community's practice at roughly 300 attendees in Germany. Pricing norms vary enormously by country and by whether employers typically pay. For broader conference and speaking context, PaperCall is another useful reference.

The two audiences

People whose employer pays. Price is nearly irrelevant to them within a wide band; what matters is that an invoice exists and the event looks legitimate enough for an expense claim.

People paying themselves. Students, freelancers, people between jobs, people whose employer does not do this. For them the price is the decision, and it is not only the ticket — travel, accommodation and days off work are frequently larger.

A single price serves one of those groups badly. Set for the second and you leave money on the table from the first; set for the first and the second does not come.

The tiers that work

Corporate. Full price, invoiced, VAT handled properly. This is the tier that funds the event.

Individual. Meaningfully lower, on the honour system. Some abuse is inevitable and is cheaper than a verification process.

Student. Lower again, verified loosely if at all.

And free or supported places, funded from the corporate tier — a grants budget rather than a price. Sponsorship is what makes that tier possible.

Three visible tiers and a grants programme covers most of it. More tiers means a pricing page nobody reads.

Why the cheap ticket is not the accessible one

The part that gets missed.

A €50 ticket does not help somebody who cannot afford €300 of travel and two days of unpaid leave. For a substantial part of the audience the ticket is the smallest line, and reducing it addresses the smallest barrier.

A grants programme covering travel does more than a discount, per euro spent, for the people furthest from attending.

And what is free matters as much as what is cheap. Childcare, a quiet room, remote streaming for people who cannot travel at all — none of these is a price and each removes a barrier that price does not touch.

The early-bird trade

Early-bird pricing exists to move revenue earlier, which is the actual constraint for a community event, and the discount is the price of that timing.

It also disadvantages the people who decide late, which correlates with uncertainty about money and time off — the same group the lower tiers were for.

A reasonable compromise: early-bird on the corporate tier only. Companies decide early anyway, individuals decide late, and the timing benefit is almost entirely from the corporate side.

What we got wrong

We priced from costs and checked the audience afterwards.

It worked because the venue was subsidised and the costs were low. It would not have worked otherwise, and we would have discovered that from who did not turn up rather than from the pricing decision.

The right order is to decide who the event is for, then find a price structure that lets them come, then work out whether the costs are coverable — and if they are not, the event is smaller, not more expensive.

The number to publish

Total cost of attending, not the ticket price, somewhere on the site.

A line saying roughly what travel and accommodation cost in your city lets somebody decide honestly instead of discovering it at the booking stage. It costs nothing, almost nobody does it, and it is the single most useful thing a pricing page can contain.

The short version