Why are tech conferences so expensive to attend?
27th September 2010
My answer to Why are tech conferences so expensive to attend? on Quora
Large conferences with big name speakers are expensive to organise. They are also priced to what the market will bear.
If you don’t want to spend the money, look in to BarCamps. They are free to attend and usually have extremely high quality talks. I’ve been to over a dozen in the past few years and I’ve learnt just as much at them as some big budget events.
http://barcamp.org/ is the official site for the BarCamp movement, and you may also find our list on http://lanyrd.com/topics/barcamp/ useful.More recent articles
- The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
- sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026
- sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25) - 5th July 2026