What festival software actually costs

The short version

Four platforms get considered by nature and birding festivals. They're not really competing for the same job:

Platform	Cost model	100-person festival at $625/pass	Built for
FestivalSentry	Flat fee per festival	~$500	Multi-day festivals with field trips
Eventbrite	% of every ticket + flat fee	~$2,500	General events, single-ticket
RegFox	Under $1 per registration	~$100	Registration forms
Zeffy	Free (donor-tip funded)	$0	Nonprofit fundraising
Cvent	License + per-registrant + setup	$3,500–$12,500	Corporate conferences

Competitor figures are from published pricing and third-party procurement data as of 2026. Verify current rates before deciding — they change.

Where we lose

Worth saying first, because you'll find out anyway.

RegFox and Zeffy are cheaper. Sometimes much cheaper.

RegFox is roughly a dollar a registration. Zeffy is free to nonprofits, funded by optional tips added at checkout. If your festival is one day, one price, and one list of attendees, both will do that fine and you should not pay us $500 for it.

The difference shows up when a single registrant buys a three-day pass, picks a different field trip each morning, four of the twelve trips have capacity limits, two require a specific guide, and one departs from a different meeting point than the rest. That's a scheduling problem wearing a registration form's clothes, and form builders don't solve it.

Cvent has more features than we do.

Session scanning, hotel room-block management, exhibitor lead retrieval, deep integrations with enterprise CRMs and marketing suites. If you need those, buy Cvent. Most nature festivals need none of them and would pay five figures for the privilege of not using them.

Where the money actually goes

The thing that surprises most organizers: percentage-based fees punish you for having valuable tickets.

Note also that with FestivalSentry the festival keeps its own Stripe account. Money goes directly to the organization, attendees never see a platform fee added at checkout, and there's no payout delay.

Feature comparison

	FestivalSentry	Eventbrite	RegFox	Cvent
Multi-day pass with per-trip selection	Yes	Workaround	Workaround	Yes
Per-trip capacity & waitlists	Yes	Partial	Partial	Yes
Guide assignment & meeting points	Yes	No	No	Partial
Offline bird checklist in the field	Yes	No	No	No
Species counts & public recaps	Yes	No	No	No
Vendor booth map & self-service claiming	Yes	No	No	Add-on
Sponsorship placement inventory	Yes	No	No	Add-on
Meal counts, shirt tallies, van rosters	Yes	No	Partial	Yes
Attendee badge & name-tag printing	Roadmap	Add-on	Partial	Yes
Built-in CRM with drip campaigns	Roadmap	No	No	Add-on
Contact export to your own CRM	Roadmap	Yes	Yes	Yes
Keep your own payment processor	Yes	No	Yes	Partial
Free tier	No	Free events only	No	No

Roadmap means committed and in development, not shipped. Ask me where a given item stands before you count on it for this year's festival.

Badges and the morning-one scramble

Almost every festival organizer has the same story: a folding table at 6:30 in the morning, a box of pre-printed name tags in alphabetical order, three people who registered last night, and a line of birders who would rather be at the meeting point.

Badge printing is coming to FestivalSentry from MemberSentry, where it already runs for membership cards. Print the whole set from your roster, or print one at the table for a walk-up — same layout either way, with the attendee's trips for the day on the badge so trip leaders can check a name without a clipboard.

Next year starts the day this one ends

The most valuable list a festival owns is the one it already has: everyone who came last year. Most festivals lose it into a spreadsheet and start cold every season.

We're building contact management directly into the platform — attendees, vendors, sponsors, and inbound inquiries in one place, with drip campaigns you can schedule against next year's event. Announce dates to last year's attendees, follow up with vendors who asked about a booth, remind sponsors when renewal opens. Exports to your own CRM will be there too, if you'd rather run it somewhere else.

The offline thing is not a gimmick

Field trips go into wildlife refuges, coastal flats, and ranch roads with no cell coverage. An attendee app that needs a signal is an app that stops working exactly when people are looking at birds.

Our checklist keeps working with no connection. Sightings queue on the device and sync when the phone is back in range. Trip leaders build the official list, attendees keep their own, and the daily totals assemble themselves. No platform in the general ticketing category does this, because no general ticketing platform has a reason to.

How to choose

• One-day event, one ticket price, under 100 people? Use RegFox or Zeffy. Save your money.
• Multi-day with a la carte field trips, guides, and capacity limits? That's what we built.
• Corporate conference with badge scanning and room blocks? Cvent.
• Free event, no complex scheduling? Eventbrite's free tier is fine.

If you're not sure which bucket you're in, email me and I'll tell you honestly — including if the answer is one of the others.