And tickets have been available for roughly 3-4 months now ;-) If you were among the earliest, you could've gotten it at as low a price as EU 160 inc VAT. And even then this conf is run at a loss. (We're not in it for the money though, we want to grow and inspire the EU startup scene instead).
Who knew conferences were expensive like that right? We certainly didn't when first working on this, so I can't blame you that you seem surprised. The best way to explain/understand is by trying to organise a conf first-hand, it's definitely been an enlightening experience for us.
Just to give you an idea of what is involved:
- Rent an awesome venue for your awesome attendees
- Designing the entire conf
- 300+ Badges/lanyards/programmes/posters/etc...
- Website / Payment systems/checkin systems
- On floor staff of about 12 people for the entire day
- Hire camera folks for video registration
- Hire photographers
- Hire audio technicians and technicians to operate projectors etc...
- Flying over international speakers (and amazing speakers they are indeed)
- Provide lodging for those international speakers
- Organizing a speaker dinner
- Make nice food available for your 300+ attendees during the two lunch breaks.
- Have a nice party at the end with drinks and laughter.
This all culminates into hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work (if not thousands, I lost track somewhere along the line), and many tens of thousands of euro's. The only reason this doesn't reach the 6 figure mark is because of sponsors and the voluntary work we put in this. I hope that after hearing this, EU 300 doesn't sound that crazy anymore ;-)
There are similar events that cost 700+ EUR for one day. With 300 EUR (and 60 EUR student ticket), BubbleConf is already taking a loss in order to make the event accessible to a large number of people.