Thanks for eliminating the "schwag" waste. I also hate that crap.

Conferences are all about coffee breaks. The coffee breaks are the conference.

Sitting around passively listening to lecturers is not a conference. It is a lecture, or as we call it these days, "live-action Vimeo".

Serving food and drinks to everyone at the same time is a way of keeping everyone together in the same space, where they can bump into each other, look over each other's shoulders, and convene spontaneous hallway meetings. That is what conferences are for. Otherwise we could just use Reddit.

In the end, you need catering because people at your conference want the catering. I spent hundreds of dollars per hour for the chance to stand with my colleagues in a space that's especially designed for meetings, but now I need to leave that space for several precious prime-time hours every day just to find food and eat it? Please, just sell me catering already!

Catering - people need to eat. 99% of conference venues will not let you bring in random food, or in most cases even professional catering companies, unless they're on an approved list. Snacks/coffee/tea/etc throughout the day cost. Our food cost, including lunch, was north of $20/head. This is surprisingly cheap.

Power - some conference venues charge you for power access. $x/seat or something. We cut down on that this year compared to first year because few people seemed to use it the first years.

Wifi - our conference center has good wifi and it's free. One place I looked at said wifi access was $25/head/day. That's not a typo.

One of my goals was to have an event with non-local speakers. A barcamp is great, but... you end up seeing mostly the same people speak on the same topics. By having people from out of the area (state/region) speak, you'll be guaranteeing most attendees in the region won't have seen/met these speakers before. That costs something. Most of our speakers have been gracious with their time, but I wanted to at least cover some of their expenses in travel. With 20 speakers, and 8-10 with that sort of assistance, that's an additional cost.

I lost > $3k on the first event. ~$2k this time around, and would like to break even this year, or perhaps (gasp) make a small profit. A large profit would allow me to do regional versions of indieconf in different areas, bringing together a mix of local and non-local experts on various freelancing topics. That was the idea 2 years ago, but I can't commit to that until I know I won't keep losing money.

EDIT: oh yeah, insurance. The venue requires an insurance policy. For the minimum coverage, that's another... $600 or so.

EDIT 2: I would have probably broken even this year except for 2 things.

1) speaker dinner. Given the enormous effort many of our speakers put in (and travel) I like to have a low-key speaker dinner that's private for them to unwind. We have a few attendees that pay for a premium ticket to have a few dining hours for some one-on-one with our speakers. As fun as it's been, we may change that event this year.

2) After-party. This year instead of some ritzy club or venue, we had a jazz trio come in and had some catered snacks (veggie trays, etc). No alcohol, but I don't think anyone cared.

Without those two additional things, I think we'd have broken even this year on tickets and sponsorships. I'd rather not eliminate either one, as I think they each add something special for different groups.

They sent someone to buy dozens of powerbars and extension cords which they chained throughout the room, plugged them into the wall sockets and then freaked out when the room went dark.

AV rental costs are insane. It is a field so ready for a disruption.

AV costs at one hotel I looked at was something like ~$300/day per room. That's ~$1000 extra, on top of the nearly double room rates compared to our current venue. It's just really hard to justify that extra expense just to be in a hotel. Yes, we're within walking distance of downtown, and there's some nice restaurants, but when I've been operating at a loss for 2 years... ;)

At Minecon (a convention for Minecraft) in the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas they were (if I recall the figure correctly) charged $50,000 for wifi for 2 days. It's insane, especially when the wifi was absolutely unusable.

That didn't include bandwidth charges which were included in a different line-item with WiFi which was based on buying blocks of 500 simultaneous users at an equally exorbitant rate.

Although sometimes taking on schwag is part of the deal you make with the sponsors - so no schwag means less sponsorship money and higher ticket prices.

I'm about 90% certain we will be doing a separate 'sponsor room' this year, where sponsors will have their own tables/booths and can interact with people, it just won't be in the main hallways. I've seen it done well at a couple other events recently, and I think we can use that format, which means we may attract a few more sponsors this year.

Also, on the schwag front, do what you can to persuade the sponsors to give out useful schwag. For example I've got a stack of branded retractable sharpies that I use every day. Somebody gave out some nice branded planning poker cards one time that I still have and use. Somebody else gave some nice single-card summaries of innovation games that I kept.

The bags, frisbies, pointless brochures... not so much.

You can offset the need for spreading out the coffee by having a fancier snack station in the sponsor room.

One big draw to the sponsor room (especially for summer conferences) are free ice-cream snacks. We had lineups to get into the sponsor room.

People expect coffee or drinks during breaks and will complain loudly regardless of the registration fee. $7-10 per person for a coffee break is not uncommon.

Think about it, a small WordPress blog on Dreamhost only costs $9/month, but Amazon needs giant datacenters to host EC2 and S3.

For your event you have about 12 presentations, so you don't need to do a huge amount of pre-planning or working with speakers. That makes a big difference.

From the schedule it looks like you are using one mid-sized plenary room plus maybe 1 or 2 side rooms. You are actually doing the hotel a favour by filling up a small block of rooms, they often have empty spaces when bigger events are going on, so everything they charge you is profit as far as they are concerned.

If the hotel has their own builtin projection equipment and you're bringing in your own computers, that seriously cuts the AV costs.

Big conferences tend to suffer from diseconomies of scale. The more you need to do, the bigger the per unit costs become. The hotel isn't likely to provide you with free projectors and screens when you need dozens at a time. That is magnified through every aspect of the conference.

Usually a small conference solves it's problems with work. You spend a lot of hours making sure everything works, but for big conferences, the staffing levels don't tend to increase proportionally with the number of attendees. For big conferences only some problems can be solved with time and effort.

That's great that you've made a profit. Do you reimburse your speakers for travel if they need it? What sort of food are you providing for $20 ticket cost?

You are collecting approximately $6000. If we didn't reimburse any speaker travel, skipped an organized closing event, and cut a few other corners, we could get close to that in terms of costs, and having 300 people attend would mean we'd be able to keep ticket prices low. You're "closely associated with various "2600" chapters across NC, SC, TN, VA, LA, DC, and NY" - I'm sure that's helped you get the word out for speakers and attendees much beyond what many other conferences (including ours) are able to do, especially with a limited budget.

Congrats on your event. I've got family in town this week and next, and am not sure if I'll be able to attend, but will attend if I can.

Thanks!