You are our Mission
Our mission is to empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events. We hope you understand our philosophy and realize that the way we operate gives both of us the best chance to succeed.
Event Espresso is the product of over 166,400 hours of development (since 2009) plus countless hours of support, and both numbers are growing daily. To put that in dollar terms, it is at least $2,900,000 just in development costs. We’ve dedicated a lot of our time and resources to this system and our customers get the entire benefit of a $2,900,000+ system for a very small fraction of that cost.
An Inexpensive Core Plugin with A la Carte Add-ons and Support
Our goal is to offer Event Espresso as a very low cost solution compared to building your own system or using a 3rd party service to handle your registrations. Most of Event Espresso users only use the core plugin, which means they do not need–nor want to pay for–all of the functionality we offer. As a result, we provide addons in an a la carte offering where customers only pay for the features they need. If we included every feature in Event Espresso, we would have to charge a much higher price for everyone.
We are often told that we provide very good support for our products. Usually our documentation is all that customers need to use Event Espresso. On the occasion that a client’s server, theme, or another plugin causes conflicts with our plugin, we help diagnose the problem and suggest a fix. However, we can not spend all our time supporting other companies’/programmers’ products. If a customer needs additional help, we do have premium support available. Again, we want to make this plugin inexpensive enough that everyone can afford it, and if we didn’t limit ourselves to supporting only Event Espresso, then the costs would greatly increase for everyone. With premium support upgrade options, only those who need extra help have to pay more.
Sponsoring Development
Our standard development rate is $140/hr when we can’t reuse the development. When there is potential to reuse the development we do for clients, we reduce our development rate. There are also opportunity costs for us when we drop the other projects we’re working on to do this; delaying other development projects further.
We prefer to work with clients who will sponsor feature development so that they benefit from reduced fees and we can develop a new feature for the Event Espresso system. From our perspective, when we partner with customers to sponsor feature development, we have to be sure that the development is done well. If done wrong, we risk reusing a product that will cost us much more in support costs than we collect in development fees. When you work with us, rest assured that our product will be well programmed, because we really have more to risk if the development is not well done.
Another reason for us to encourage shared sponsorship development is because if you want to take control of the license after any development work, then you’ll be responsible for any fixes or upgrades. For example, if you would like Event Espresso to be integrated with a particular merchant account or gateway, and you control the license, when that gateway makes any changes to their API then you have to pay us or someone else again for support. The advantage of us developing the gateway, as opposed to another developer, is that we can spread the on-going support costs across more users, whereas if you get it developed just for yourself, on-going support will be more costly. You’ll also get free fixes if something breaks because we have many people relying on this development.
We’re not trying to make a large profit from you sponsoring the development. We’re simply trying to cover some of our costs if this development never contributes to revenue, even if we hope it will. We also need to have a reasonable price so we can work with people who are serious about their business and investing in their idea. It is always clear that Event Espresso owns exclusive rights to the development.