I was asked recently about the cost of running a (#rustlang) conference and why the ticket prices are what they are. We figured we can just publicly share the numbers for RustWeek, in the name of #transparency. :)
RustWeek has many subevents (conference, hackathon, unconference, workshops, Rust All Hands, etc.), but I've tried to extract just the two day conference part of RustWeek 2026:
Venue rent: € ~50k
Lunch, snacks, drinks two full days: € ~130k (incl. catering services and exclusive access to 1000 person restaurant all day)
A/V services: € ~30k (incl. livestreaming, professionals operating the cameras/microphones/screens in the rooms, editing the recordings, etc.)
Stuff we set up at the venue: € ~20k (sponsor booths, entertainment, banners, stickers, wifi, etc.)
Travel compenstation for speakers: € ~10k
External services: € ~25k (accounting, registration & payment, event management, insurance, etc.)
Miscelaneous: € ~15k
This adds up to roughly € 280k for just the two conference days. (The total for all of RustWeek is ~€ 400k.)
The money we get from sponsors covers roughly half of the costs. The other half has to be covered by tickets.
We are currently the biggest Rust conference with 850+ attendees. We give free tickets to all the speakers and volunteers, which is almost a hundred people total. The sponsor packages also include a total of roughly 100 tickets. That leaves ~650 sold tickets.
Those are roughly 250 corporate tickets (~410 euro after tax), 300 individual tickets (~190 euro after tax), and 100 student tickets (~30 euro after tax). Accounting for the various discounts (early bird, discount codes, etc.) and overhead, this leaves us with roughly 140k.
Those student tickets are sold at a significant loss, but it's very important to us to not just run this conference for those with a well paid job.
Setting the ticket prices is very tricky, because you have to set them a year in advance, before you know what amount of sponsorship to expect. We only find out *after* the event if we guessed correctly or if we ran at a loss. This year, we made a (very small) profit, which we'll spend on our Rust Maintainers Team: https://rustnl.org/maintainers/
