Outcome-Based Pricing for Event Apps: Pay Only When Attendees Engage

Most event app vendors charge you for everything. Platform fees. Per-attendee fees. Feature fees. Add-on fees. Some even charge based on how many files you upload or how many sponsors you list.

And most of them require an annual contract, so you're locked in whether the product delivers or not.

This pricing model made sense in 2012, when event apps were expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and required weeks of implementation support. The vendor took on real cost before your event started, so they needed to get paid upfront.

That world doesn't exist anymore. AI has fundamentally changed what it costs to build, configure, and deliver a great event app. But the pricing hasn't caught up. Most vendors are still charging 2012 prices on 2012 terms for what is now a radically different cost structure.

Today, we're changing that.

How Highbar pricing works

We use outcome-based pricing. You only pay when your attendees actually engage with your event app.

$5 per engaged attendee. Not per registered attendee. Not per checked-in attendee. Per attendee who actually used the app in a meaningful way.

Every feature included. AI concierge, networking agent, session recommendations, sponsor profiles, activity stream, custom branding, white labeling, lead retrieval, engagement analytics. All of it. No tiers, no add-ons, no premium features locked behind a higher plan.

$100 credit included with every app. That covers your first 20 engaged attendees. It's enough to test Highbar at a team meeting, a small internal event, or any gathering where you want to see the product work before committing to anything larger.

$9,500 hard cap. No matter how large your event, your cost never exceeds $9,500. A 5,000-person national conference pays the same maximum as a 10,000-person one.

No platform fees. No annual contracts. No cancellation fees. You build your event, you run your event, you pay based on what happened.

What counts as "engaged"

We set the bar intentionally high. An engaged attendee is someone who took 5 or more meaningful actions inside the app.

What doesn't count: logging in, opening the home screen, configuring settings. These are setup actions, not engagement.

What does count: asking the AI concierge a question, exploring the schedule, setting up a personal networking agent, bookmarking a session, interacting with the activity stream, engaging with a sponsor profile. These are the actions that indicate an attendee is getting real value from the app.

If someone downloads the app, opens it once, and never comes back, you pay nothing for that person. If someone engages deeply and gets a personalized, AI-powered experience that makes their event better, you pay $5.

The principle is simple: if your attendees didn't get value, you don't pay.

What this looks like at different scales

A 30-person team meeting with 70% engagement: about $25 after the $100 credit. For that, you get a fully branded, AI-powered event app with every feature Highbar offers.

A 500-person conference with 70% engagement: about $1,650. Every attendee who engages gets AI-powered session recommendations, networking matches, and a concierge that can answer questions about the event instantly.

A 5,000-person national conference with 70% engagement: $9,500, hitting the cap. The same platform, the same features, the same AI, at a fraction of what legacy vendors charge for events this size.

Same platform. Same features. Same AI. From a small team offsite to a national conference. The only thing that changes is the price, and it only changes in proportion to the value delivered.

Why we did this

Outcome-based pricing is a bet on our own product.

Most event app vendors charge upfront because they can't guarantee you'll see results. They get paid whether the app works well or not. Whether attendees love it or ignore it. Whether it drives engagement or collects dust on someone's phone.

That misalignment has been baked into event tech for over a decade. The vendor's incentive is to close the deal and deliver the minimum viable product. The organizer's incentive is to deliver an incredible attendee experience. Those two things should be the same incentive, but legacy pricing models pull them apart.

We charge after your event, based on actual engagement data, because it's the right thing to do.

Highbar averages a 70% deep engagement rate among checked-in attendees. We're confident enough in that number to tie our entire revenue model to it. If we build a great experience and your attendees love it, we do well and earn your business for the next event. If we don't, we don't.

That alignment is the whole point. When our success depends on your attendees having a great experience, every product decision we make is oriented toward that outcome. There's no incentive to ship bloated features that check boxes on an RFP but don't get used. There's no incentive to lock you into a contract so you can't leave. There's only the incentive to make the app so good that people actually use it.

That's how events work. That's how event tech should work too.

Get started

Every Highbar app comes with a $100 credit. Build your event app, try it at your next meeting, and see what engagement looks like. You don't pay anything until your attendees prove the product works.

Try the cost calculator and see what your next event would cost at highbar.ai/pricing.

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