Because the price depends on how big you are, and telling you before they know that costs them money. Cvent, Bizzabo, Whova and vFairs publish nothing. Eventbrite, Humanitix, Ticket Tailor and eventcloud publish everything. The dividing line is not company size or honesty, it is the charging model: platforms billing per registrant hide the number, platforms billing a fixed amount print it.
What "request a demo" is actually doing
A demo request is a qualification step. Before a number reaches you, a salesperson wants your event count, your average attendee numbers, your renewal date and ideally your current supplier. Every one of those inputs moves the quote. That is not a conspiracy, it is how enterprise software has been sold since the 1990s, and it is defensible when the product genuinely varies by deployment.
What it costs you is comparison. You cannot line three quote-only vendors up against each other without running three sales processes, each of which takes weeks and each of which ends with a number you are not allowed to show the others. By the time you can compare, you have spent more evaluating than a smaller platform would have cost you for the year.
Which platforms publish a price, and what the same event costs on each
The table below prices platform charges only, on a $50 ticket or registration, using published US rates where they exist and clearly labelled reported figures where they do not. Payment processing is excluded except where a platform bundles it, which is noted underneath.
| Platform | Price published | 500 tickets | 5,000 tickets | 50,000 tickets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | Yes, in full | $2,598 | $25,978 | $259,778 |
| Humanitix | Yes, in the help centre | $1,895 | $18,950 | $189,500 |
| Ticket Tailor | Yes in GBP, no verifiable US rate | Not verifiable in USD | Not verifiable in USD | Not verifiable in USD |
| Cvent | No | Reported $3,500 plus annual licence | Reported $35,000 plus annual licence | Reported $350,000 plus annual licence |
| Bizzabo | No | Reported near $18,000 a year, three-seat minimum | Reported near $18,000 a year, three-seat minimum | Reported near $18,000 a year, three-seat minimum |
| Whova | No | Reported $1,245 plus a per-event platform fee | Reported $12,450 plus a per-event platform fee | Reported $124,500 plus a per-event platform fee |
| eventcloud | Yes, in full | $1,250 a year, one user | $1,250 a year, one user | $1,250 a year, one user |
Notes on the sums. Eventbrite is 3.7% plus $1.79 service per paid ticket with 2.9% processing charged on the whole order including the service fee, which works out at $5.1956 a ticket and is slightly higher than the face-value-only method most comparison tables use. Humanitix US is 5% plus $1.29 and that figure already includes card processing, which is why it looks cheaper than it is against platforms where processing is separate. Cvent's per-registrant charge for the combined Attendee Hub and Event App is reported at $7 to $12 and sits on top of an annual licence reported between roughly $19,500 and $79,000. Bizzabo is reported at about $499 a seat each month billed annually with a three-seat minimum, and does not add a per-ticket charge, which is why its row does not move. The eventcloud row is the published annual price for one user and does not include Stripe's processing, which you pay directly because the money lands in your own Stripe account rather than ours.
Why per-registrant pricing cannot be published honestly
A published price is a promise about a number you cannot control. If a vendor charges per registrant, its revenue from you is a function of your success, and its cost of serving you is not. That gap is where negotiation lives, and negotiation needs privacy on at least one side.
There is a second, less cynical reason. Enterprise event platforms genuinely do sell different things to different buyers: modules, implementation, integration work, service levels. A single number on a web page would be wrong for almost everybody. The problem is not that the price is complicated, it is that "complicated" has become a reason to publish nothing at all, including the shape of the bill, which is not complicated and would help enormously.
What Would Zero Booking Fees Save You?
eventcloud charges a flat subscription, not a cut of every ticket. Compare it with what your current platform takes.
What the quote contains that the website did not
When the number finally arrives, it usually has three layers rather than one. There is an annual platform licence, billed whether you run four events or forty. There is a variable charge per registrant per event, which is the layer that compounds. And there is a first-year implementation or onboarding fee, frequently five figures, which is real work but is also the easiest line to forget when you compare year one against a competitor's year three.
Then there are the terms. One to three year commitments are normal at this end of the market, auto-renewal is normal, and the notice window for cancelling is often shorter than the procurement cycle needed to replace the thing. None of that is hidden, but none of it is on the website either.
Five questions that get you a comparable number
You cannot make a quote-only vendor publish a price. You can make the quote comparable.
What is the total for year one and for year three, with implementation shown separately?
Which parts of the bill move if my attendee numbers double, and by how much?
What is the per-registrant rate, and does it apply to free registrations, no-shows and cancellations?
Which of the features in this demo are in the quoted licence and which are separately priced modules?
What is the renewal uplift cap, and what is the notice period for not renewing?
Ask the last two in writing. The answers are frequently different from the answers you get on a call, and the difference is the point.
What a published price looks like when the model allows one
Platforms that charge a fixed amount can publish, because the number does not depend on how well your year goes. Ticket Tailor prints a per-ticket rate. eventcloud prints a per-user subscription: £95, EUR 110 or $125 a user each month, or £950, EUR 1,100 or $1,250 a user for the year, which is ten months of the monthly rate rather than twelve. There is no per-ticket charge and no per-registrant charge, so the row above does not move between 500 and 50,000.
Be clear about what that does and does not cover, because a flat price with quiet exceptions is worse than a quoted one. It covers usage: events, tickets, registrations and attendees. It is not unlimited users, and the bill tracks your headcount rather than your revenue, which is its own kind of sting if your team grows faster than your audience. Stripe processing is separate and paid to Stripe. White-label and organisation subdomains sit in the Enterprise arrangement rather than in the Team seat price. Exports come out as Excel files (.xlsx). And Stripe is the only system eventcloud talks to, so if your registrations need to appear automatically in whatever your sales team runs on, that is an export and an import at your end.
Who this is not for
eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If most of your programme happens on a screen with a production layer behind it, Bizzabo or vFairs will serve you better and the published price will not save you.
Attendee networking and matchmaking are not part of eventcloud, and there is no delegate community app. Buyers whose delegates spend the conference inside an app should be comparing Cvent and Whova on features rather than comparing anybody on price transparency.
And if you run one paid event a year for eighty people, none of this matters. A per-ticket platform will cost you forty dollars and take an afternoon. A subscription is the wrong shape for you, and the fact that we publish ours does not make it the right one.
If you would rather start from a number than a discovery call, ours is on the pricing page, including the parts that are not included.
