Ticketing for user conferences: tiers, registration and fees
A user conference is a marketing program with a ticket page attached. Customers pay a discounted rate you do not want on the public page, partners and prospects get their own tiers, sponsors buy packages, and every registration has to land in the CRM attributed to the campaign that produced it. Run it on your own domain, not a marketplace.
By Checkout Page · Updated September 5, 2026 · 9 min read
On this page
- What is different about a user conference?
- How should you price customer, partner and prospect tickets?
- How do you sell sponsor and partner packages?
- How do you upsell the training day?
- How do you embed registration in the product website and keep attribution?
- How do registrations get into the CRM?
- What will a user conference cost in platform fees?
- Where does Checkout Page not fit a user conference?
- What should you read next?
What is different about a user conference?
The first consequence is that price is a segmentation tool rather than a revenue target. Customers pay $299 because you want them in the room, prospects sometimes pay nothing because sales invited them, and partners pay more because their attendance is a business development expense. The public page should show one price and let codes do the rest.
The second is that the ticket page is part of the product website. It sits on your domain, in your design system, with your pixels firing and your UTM parameters intact. A redirect to a marketplace breaks all three and tells a customer that your event is a listing.
The third is that the funnel does not end at payment. The registration is a campaign member, a CSM task, a badge, a session preference and a follow-up sequence. Whatever tool you pick has to hand that data onwards cleanly.
How should you price customer, partner and prospect tickets?
| Tier | Example price | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Standard or public | $499 | The anchor price, and the only one on the public page |
| Customer rate | $299 | Delivered by code to the customer list, so the discount stays out of public view |
| Customer early bird | $199 | A dated code for the first six weeks, which pulls registrations forward |
| Prospect or sales invitation | $0 to $199 | Issued by reps with a capped code each, so you can see whose invitations convert |
| Partner | $499 | Same price as standard, tracked separately for the partner team's reporting |
| Sponsor package seats | Included | Contracted seats, redeemed with a per-sponsor code matching the contract |
| Employee | $0 | Capped, and worth counting, because internal attendance eats venue capacity |
| Training or certification day | $349 add-on | The one tier with real margin, and a hard room cap |
| Executive summit | Invitation only | A separate capped ticket type, never publicly bookable |
| Virtual pass | $0 with registration | Trades ticket revenue for a lead list, which is usually the right trade |
Publishing a customer discount as a visible tier can invite prospects to ask for the same price. A code or restricted ticket type keeps eligibility rules out of the public price list and makes redemptions measurable.
How do you sell sponsor and partner packages?
If you sell smaller packages self-serve, for example a $2,500 partner booth, that can be a paid ticket type with a per-order maximum of one and required fields for the company details. Anything above that usually needs a contract and an invoice, which is a sales process, not a checkout.
Partners also need to bring customers. A partner-issued invitation code, capped at ten uses and tagged to that partner, is the cleanest way to attribute the registrations they generate. The sponsor and comp tickets guide covers the code structure in detail.
How do you upsell the training day?
Training days and certification tracks can have a different margin from the main conference. Price a $349 add-on from its instructor, room and support costs, then test whether buyers attach it at the checkout placement you choose.
Give the training day a real capacity, because rooms and instructors are finite, and show the remaining count when it gets low. The workshop add-ons and multi-day passes guide covers how to structure add-ons against a main ticket.
From our publisher · Checkout Page
Put your ticket plan into practice
Set up ticket types and registration questions on Checkout Page. Free up to $3,000 in monthly sales; Stripe processing fees apply.
How do you embed registration in the product website and keep attribution?
The practical benefit is not philosophical. When the checkout lives on a third-party domain, your paid channels report a click and lose the conversion, your session recording stops at the handoff, and the attribution conversation in the Monday meeting is unresolvable. When it is embedded, the whole path is on your property.
A second benefit is design. Your event page can look like your product, with your fonts, your screenshots and your customer logos, rather than a template with a logo slot. For the implementation options, see selling conference tickets on your website.
How do registrations get into the CRM?
The mapping that matters is small. Send the email address, the ticket type, the coupon code used, the company name and the session or track answers. The coupon code is the field people forget, and it is the one that tells you whether the registration came from the customer list, a rep's invitation or a partner.
Set the automation up before you open registration, not after fifty people have already bought. Backfilling by CSV works but you lose the real-time account owner notification, which is the part sales actually cares about.
Cart abandonment is the other automation worth switching on. On the Scale plan, up to three emails go to people who started and did not finish. At $299 with an expense approval in the middle, that gap holds real registrations.
What will a user conference cost in platform fees?
The arithmetic. Three hundred customer tickets at $299 is $89,700 and 80 partner tickets at $499 is $39,920, giving $129,620 across 380 paid registrations.
Eventbrite charges 3.7 percent, which is $4,796, plus $1.79 on each paid ticket, which is $680, so $5,476. Tito charges 3 percent per paid ticket capped at 25 euros, about $27, and neither price reaches the cap, so 3 percent of $129,620 is $3,889. Luma Free charges 5 percent on paid tickets, or $6,481. Luma Plus is $69 a month on the monthly plan, so the four-month window is $276 and the platform fee drops to 0 percent; Stripe processing still applies.
| Platform | Basis on this exact ticket mix | Illustrated platform cost |
|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | 3.7% of $129,620 + $1.79 × 380 paid registrations | $5,476 |
| Tito | 3% of $129,620; both paid tiers remain below the illustrative cap | $3,889 |
| Luma Free | 5% of $129,620; Stripe processing excluded | $6,481 |
| Luma Plus monthly | $69 × 4 selling months; 0% platform fee, Stripe processing excluded | $276 |
| Checkout Page | $18,000, $40,000, $46,620 and $25,000 across four selling months | $1,006 |
Checkout Page charges no per-ticket fee. What you pay is a monthly plan set by sales volume: $0 up to $3,000 a month, $99 up to $10,000, then rising in steps to $699 at $150,000. Four months of selling at roughly $18,000, $40,000, $46,620 and $25,000 costs $169, $299, $299 and $239, which is $1,006. You would be on those bands anyway for the one-click upsells and abandonment emails.
Rates checked 5 September 2026: Eventbrite organizer pricing, Tito pricing, Luma monthly Plus pricing and Checkout Page pricing. Eventbrite, Tito and Checkout Page rows exclude payment processing; Luma Plus removes the platform fee but Stripe processing still applies.
At an illustrative 2.9 percent plus $0.30 rate, $129,620 across 380 separate paid orders produces about $3,873 in processing. Group orders reduce the fixed-fee count, and actual gateways and rates differ.
Where does Checkout Page not fit a user conference?
The agenda point is the one to plan around. A 500-person user conference with eight tracks usually wants a personalized agenda in an app, and that is a separate product. The workable split is registration and payment in the ticketing tool, agenda and networking in an event app, joined by the attendee export or a webhook.
Badge printing is the second gap. Export attendees with company and job title to CSV and hand it to a badge vendor, or connect a badge tool through Zapier. And check the venue WiFi before the day, because the check-in scanner needs a connection, and 500 people arriving in a forty-minute window is not the moment to discover the network is capped.
The marketplace gap is irrelevant here, and arguably a benefit. Nobody finds your user conference by browsing events near them.
What should you read next?
- Sell conference tickets on your website, for embedding checkout and keeping UTM parameters
- Workshop add-ons and multi-day passes, for pricing and capping the training day
- Speaker, sponsor and comp tickets, for per-sponsor and per-rep codes
- Conference ticket tiers template, a tier table you can adapt for customer and partner pricing
Frequently asked questions
- How do you make a ticket type customers only?
- Two ways. Publish one public price and send customers a coupon code that discounts it, which is simplest and works in email and in-app. Or keep a separate customer ticket type hidden behind a code so the discounted price never appears on the public page. Use codes per segment so you can see which list converted.
- Can registrations sync to our CRM automatically?
- Yes, through Zapier, Make or a webhook fired on each order, which is how most teams push registrations into Salesforce or HubSpot as campaign members. There is also a Google Sheets integration if your ops team prefers a sheet. There is no native CRM integration, so budget an hour for the connection.
- Can we track ad conversions on the ticket page?
- Yes. Tracking pixels are available from the Launch plan up, so Google, Meta and LinkedIn conversions fire on the ticket page and on the confirmation. Keep your UTM parameters intact through the embed and the attribution report stops being an argument between marketing and sales.
- How do you upsell a training day?
- Two places. An order bump at checkout, available on every plan, adds the training day as a checkbox before payment. A one-click upsell after payment, available on Scale, offers it again without requiring card details to be re-entered. Test both placements and compare attach rates rather than assuming the second offer will convert.
- Do abandoned registrations get followed up?
- On the Scale plan, up to three cart-abandonment emails can follow up with people who entered details but did not finish. Whether they recover enough registrations to cover the plan depends on traffic, ticket price and abandonment rate. Measure recovered revenue rather than assuming the feature pays for itself.
- Should a user conference use a ticketing marketplace?
- Usually not, if registrations already come from product messages, customer emails, account teams and partners. Check referral data before dismissing discovery entirely. An embedded checkout can keep the purchase on your domain and preserve first-party analytics, though every implementation should be tested for attribution continuity.
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Checkout Page builds checkout and event ticketing software. This site covers conference registration through product documentation, fee calculations and practical planning examples.
Published by Checkout Page, one of the platforms covered. Comparisons use public pricing and documentation. Our editorial approach.
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