The team over at EventCloud wrote this article about AccredTix, and it would be a fair assessment to say they have hit the nail on the head.
It explains why we made AccredTix free better than almost anything we could have written ourselves. But it is worth telling the story in our own words too, because whenever you make an established enterprise platform available for free, the first question is inevitably, What’s the catch?
The answer is simple: there isn’t one.
That does not mean there is no business model. It means we do not believe the basic ability to run an event's accreditation properly should be held behind a sales call, an annoying procurement process or a ever-moving quotation.
We built AccredTix because we needed it
AccredTix was not created as a speculative product. It came from our team working on years of live events and repeatedly seeing the same problems: accreditation managed through spreadsheets, guest lists bombarding WhatsApp, vehicle information arriving through google forms, catering allocations tracked by whoever had the envelope of meal tickets and critical documents scattered across different dropboxes.
Most of the events around the world, be it sporting, music or even food have one thing in common, the people. Events don't lack experts, they lack one place where those experts can manage their operation together. They lack the sharing of information.
So, with this knowledge, we built AccredTix around the reality of delivering events, not around what looks impressive during a demo call.
AccredTix has since been used by major promoters, venues, festivals and production teams. That experience helped us build a platform capable of handling complex, large-scale operations. It also helped us build a platform that we believe is one of the best for handling the biggest events with speed and reliability.
But, it also raised an uncomfortable question - Why should access to tools like AccredTix be limited to events with huge enterprise style budgets?
Well, we don't think it should.
The traditional software sales process is backwards
In most areas of our lives, we can try software before deciding whether it is right for us, or we can use it for free and understand the trade off (Google sheets is free to use as an individual or freelancer, but in return it's widely accepted that enterprise users pay for it in large sums). Event technology often works differently.
You complete a contact form. You wait for a salesperson. You sit through a demonstration. You explain your operation several times. Eventually, someone tells you the price.
Only after contracts, onboarding calls and implementation meetings do you discover whether the platform actually works for your setup.
That process may suit the vendor, but it does very little for the accreditation manager on a 1-day-a-week advance who needs to hit the ground running.
A polished (and rehearsed) demo can show you what software is capable of doing. It cannot show you how easily your team can use it when the shutters on the accreditation cabin open on a show day.
In our opinion, the only meaningful test is to build a real event in the system and try to break it. So that is what we now let people do.
Free should mean usable, right?
The free version of AccredTix is not a temporary trial designed to stop working once your event becomes dependent on it. It's designed to grow with you.
It is not a deliberately restricted demonstration where every useful feature leads to an upgrade screen. You can use the platform to manage the core operational areas that AccredTix was built for: accreditation, guest lists, catering, accommodation, vehicles, inductions, documentation, advancing and communications.
You can create an account, configure an event and decide for yourself whether the system works for you. No compulsory demonstration. No setup period. No conversation with a salesperson before you are allowed to see the product.
So how do we make money?
There is an important distinction between having a business model and creating a catch.
Some events need more than the standard self-service platform. They may want advanced reporting, AI-assisted operations, mobile wallet credentials, dedicated support, custom development, specialist integrations or preconfigured scanning hardware. Those organisations can pay for Pro or Enterprise plans.
That revenue allows us to continue developing the platform while keeping the core system accessible to events that do not need those additional capabilities.
A good analogy we have used when talking about this decision before is one of trucking. A band our co-founder Alex used to work for was adamant on a recent arena tour that they use a trucking supplier who was slightly more expensive than a competitor. When the tour manager was asked why this was the case, they explained that the supplier had provided the band with their first box truck 15 years ago for just the drivers wage. Loyalty is the best source of business.
The industry we work in still values relationships, connections and loyalty. That's what we want to bring to AccredTix. It's a system that can support you for free when you have 500 guests and a bunch of tyveck wristbands, and in return when you move to 50,000 guests and a RFID setup, we're still there to support you, but on an enterprise level.
We would rather earn revenue by providing more value than by withholding the basic product from events who can't quite make a line for it in the budget.
We also believe this creates a healthier relationship with customers. An event should upgrade because the additional service makes sense for its operation, not because its data, workflows or event have been trapped behind an artificial limit.
This is not only about smaller events
It would be easy to position the free tier as a simplified product for small events but that misses the point. The platform has been shaped by large scale event operations. We are now making that same underlying system available to everyone.
A local venue should be able to benefit from the same operational structure as a major festival. An independent promoter should not have to choose between expensive software and a collection of disconnected spreadsheets.
Smaller teams often have fewer people carrying more responsibility. They arguably need effective systems more, not less.
The real reason we made AccredTix free
We want AccredTix to become part of how events operate. The fastest way to achieve that is not to put more people into a sales pipeline. It is to let more event pros use the product.
Some will run one event and never pay us anything.
Some will (hopefully) use the free platform for years.
Others will grow, require additional capabilities and become paying customers.
All three outcomes are acceptable.
Every event that replaces those damn spreadsheets, insane inboxes and manual processes with a clearer operational system is evidence that the decision worked, and truthfully, it makes us happy.
So, What's the catch?
As we said above, there isn't. There is no hidden deadline to get your data. No compulsory sales call. No requirement to upgrade simply because your event has become important.
We built AccredTix to help event teams run better operations.
Now we are removing the biggest barrier to using it.