I think this depends on one-off vs long term. If this group is going to be doing 2~3 conferences a year, learning how to print labels yourself or is valuable skill. You might even have a designer on your team that could work with a local print shop (allowing a personal relationship and even last minute badges so you're not handwriting last minute speakers).

There's a one time cost of learning all that stuff, and then each year you just reuse those same templates and skills with a new logo/graphics from your design guy.

If this is something your team/volunteer group/etc. rarely does, then it's probably worth just paying conference badges. It's a trade-off.

If it's a non-profit thing, consider open souring the process and CC licensing the designs to help others doing the same thing.

I organise conferences as a hobby, and I've been manually doing mail merge on badges for the past few years.

It takes me anywhere between 5–15 minutes to set things up, and my biggest annoyance throughout the process is dealing with CSV character encodings.

I think the main value the service provides is that it provides "guaranteed" next-day delivery. My print shop gives me a fair amount of crap for not sending my badges to print a few days in advance.

On the other hand, it's so much less work for organisers to print blank white boxes, and let attendees fill in their own preferred names at check-in.

Hmmm, I hear you but I’m really skeptical of valuing any full time employee’s time at $25/hour.

The true cost of a full time office worker employee once all taxes and benefits are factored in are usually going to be a lot higher than that. This would make the service a lot more worth it.

OTOH if that employee is underutilized, their time is effectively free, so the only thing you would be paying for is (hopefully) quality and consistency.

Badge printing kits/holders are not free :) https://www.amazon.com/Avery-Badges-Lanyards-Holders-Inserts...

Blank lanyards and card holders are really cheap if bought separately, and one really only needs to make sure that their printer prints 4x6" or A6, instead of buying such an expensive kit.

It's not just her pay for 10 hours, there is the lost opportunity cost of other work she could have done that day(s) and the supply cost for 325 badges/holders/lanyards/etc...

$300 bucks is nothing compared to the costs of running a convention. And also there's other stuff Anna needed to be working on that didn't happen.

Empty badges are around ~$0.50. At 325 badges, that reduces the difference by $165.

you dont understand business stakeholders. Shelley is busy and overworked. She is relatively price insensitive, but is very time sensitive.

Our (enterprise) business customers dont care about price much, they care about things going smoothly for an event which has a ton of moving parts.

We serve a similar demographic.