Hopin has made significant changes to their pricing and the cost of the platform is now outside of our event’s budget. Gather provides reasonable per event, per attendee pricing that sits well within our event’s budget. We got a quote from Hopin for this years event and it was 9 times what we paid last year.

In Hopin’s defense, they’ve added a lot of new features that appeal to larger organizations with larger budgets. However, they have also significantly reduced their support for smaller events like ours.

Somewhat ironically, we’re going to be using the StreamYard platform for streaming and recording our conference talks on the main stage, and StreamYard was acquired by Hopin a few years ago. StreamYard’s pricing is still very reasonable for an event like ours.

We also got quotes from other platforms that offer feature sets that are similar to Hopin, such as Accelevents, but it was still too expensive. Those quotes were about 4 times what we paid for Hopin last year.

We’ll collect feedback after this year’s event, and one of the things that we’ll ask about is how well Gather has worked. If it turns out to not be a good fit, then we’ll use something different next year, even if it means that we need to increase our budget. It also may mean that we’ll need to start charging for the event to offset some of the cost.