Unlimited registrations means the platform does not count your delegates: no cap on events, registrations or attendees, and a sell-out does not change the bill. What you pay for is your team's seats. What still has a ceiling is operational, not commercial: order line sizes, export sizes, languages and domains, all listed below so you can plan around them.
What Does "Unlimited" Actually Cover?
The wording we use is specific, because vague promises are how "unlimited" earned its bad name: "Unlimited events, registrations and attendees on every plan. We count team seats, not tickets, so your bill does not rise because your event sells out. The limits that do exist are operational, not commercial: 99 of one ticket type per order line, 10,000 orders per Excel export, five languages per event, and one subdomain and one sending domain per organisation."
Read that as a conference producer would. You can run a two-day congress in March, a roadshow in five cities in May and an awards dinner in November from one account, and nobody at eventcloud tallies how many people registered for each. Every capability we ship is on every seat, so there is no tier where session booking, session scanning or the Badge Kiosk sits behind an upgrade. The registration features are the same whether your event has 80 delegates or 8,000.
What Does a Registration Meter Do to a Conference That Sells Out?
It turns success into a line on the invoice. Under a per-registrant or per-ticket model, every extra delegate is a new unit of charge, so the better your marketing works, the larger the bill gets. That is a legitimate business model, but it means the finance team and the marketing team want opposite things in the final fortnight before a sell-out.
The published and reported models make the point. Cvent does not publish prices, but buyer-side write-ups report a per-registrant fee for its attendee hub and event app on top of an annual licence, and report that registration is sold against a committed annual volume with overage fees above it (InEvent, March 2026; Docket, April 2026). Eventbrite publishes a service fee on each paid ticket plus a processing fee per order (Eventbrite organiser pricing, checked 28 October 2026). Both of those scale with volume by design. A flat seat is a different model, not a bargain: it simply removes the volume variable from the invoice.
Which Limits Still Exist?
Several, and naming them is what makes "unlimited" believable. None of them is commercial: you cannot buy your way past them, and they do not rise or fall with how many people register.
| Limit | What It Is | What to Do About It |
|---|---|---|
| Order line size | 99 of one ticket type per order line | Put larger groups on several order lines, or use group rates and attendee import for very large blocks |
| Excel export | 10,000 orders per export, and exports are .xlsx only | Filter by ticket group, date or search, and export in slices for the biggest shows |
| Languages | Five per event, each at its own web address: UK English, US English, Spanish, German and French | Choose your primary language plus up to four more; Arabic is beta only |
| Domains | One subdomain (yourname.eventcloud.io) and one sending domain per organisation | Custom app domains and white-label are Enterprise arrangements |
| Currency | One currency per event | Run a second event if you sell in a second currency |
| Attendee import | 20 MB and 50,000 rows, on published events only | Split very large lists; the free trial cannot import |
| Hosting | Production is hosted in one United States region | Tell your delegates in your privacy notice |
Notice what is missing from that list: no ceiling on registrations, no ceiling on attendees, no ceiling on events. If a limit ever applied to those, we would not call the thing unlimited.
What Does a Sold-out Conference Look Like in Practice?
Capacity is something you set, not something you are sold. You choose capacity per ticket type and across the event, and the form stops taking registrations when the number is reached. Stacked price windows let early bird become standard and then door price on dates you pick, and group rates give up to six "from N tickets, X each" breaks per paid price window, counted per pass per order.
Conference Registration Without the Procurement Saga.
Delegate types, early-bird windows, session booking, badges designed in millimetres and check-in from any phone, with no limit on delegates.
If you have programme sessions that fill before the conference does, session booking holds a separate capacity per session, and only ticket types that ask for attendee details per ticket can book sessions. On the day, session scanning at a session's door shows every device a running count of admissions against capacity. Insights shows totals such as check-in rate and arrivals by hour. If you want to hold a few places back, a private ticket group reached by a secret link keeps them out of public sale, which suits speakers, sponsors and board members.
Sell-outs also create waiting lists. eventcloud has a waiting list for tickets that are not yet on sale and emails everyone the moment they open. Coming soon: a waitlist for sold-out tickets or full sessions. Until then, a sold-out conference with a long queue of disappointed delegates is a good reason to open a second ticket group or a second date.
How Do You Test Any "Unlimited" Claim Before You Sign?
Ask for the limits in writing, then ask what is being counted. Vendors who say "unlimited" usually mean one thing is unlimited while three others quietly are not, and the useful conversation is about the other three.
What unit do you charge on: seats, registrants, tickets, badges printed, scanners or leads? Ask for each separately, because a platform can be flat on one and metered on another.
Do free tickets, complimentary speaker passes and re-issued badges count towards a committed volume?
What happens above the volume in the contract? Ask for the overage rate in writing and ask when it was last changed.
Which capabilities sit behind a higher tier, and which of them does your event need on day one?
Which operational limits exist, such as order sizes, export sizes, languages and domains, and has any of them ever stopped a customer's event?
Our own answers to those five are on this page, which is the point. If a vendor cannot answer in a paragraph, the paragraph you would have needed is probably the expensive one. A sold-out hall is the worst moment to learn what your contract counts, because by then your delegates have paid and your team is on the floor.
Where Is the Catch?
The catch is the shape of the bill. You pay for your team, so a large registration desk with many staff logging in will cost more than a lean one, and your ticket revenue settles straight into your own Stripe account, where Stripe's own fee still applies. A per-ticket platform costs less below a few hundred paid tickets a year, and the Eventbrite model above is a fair fit for a one-off event of that size.
eventcloud does not do conditional form logic yet. If your registration depends on branching questions, use a separate form per ticket group. Coming soon: CRM sync for Salesforce, HubSpot and Dynamics. If you run one of them today, you will be exporting to Excel and importing at your end.
For a wider view of what an unlimited model covers across a whole programme, the earlier piece on what unlimited events and attendees actually buys you goes through it, and the conferences page shows how the pieces fit for a congress.
A sensible next step is to pull last year's registration total, ask each vendor on your shortlist what that number would have done to their invoice, and ask which of the limits above could ever touch you.
