The software is free. The hosting is yours. That is the whole model.
No licence, no seats, no per-speaker charge, no sales call and no quote. Below is what you will actually pay, and what this model costs you in things that are not money.
Five lines, one of which is fixed.
| Line | Cost | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| The software | £0 / $0 / €0 | MIT. No licence, no seat, no per-speaker charge, no per-event activation, and no edition that costs more. |
| Cloudflare Workers Paid | From $5 / month | The one fixed line. It carries the application, the database, the queues and the scheduled jobs. Published on Cloudflare's own pricing page and correct in August 2026. Check it; it is not our price to promise. |
| Storage and messages | Metered, small | Headshots and slides in your own bucket, database reads and writes, queue messages. A conference is a small workload next to the included allowances, but your event is not our event. Put your numbers into Cloudflare's calculator. |
| An email provider | Often free at this volume | Resend and SendGrid both have a free tier that one conference's mail usually fits inside. Install nothing and mail is composed and recorded but never sent, which is a legitimate way to rehearse. |
| A domain | You already have one | It runs on a subdomain of the conference site you already pay for. |
We are not going to invent a monthly total for you. Every "typical bill" figure on a page like this is a guess dressed up as a measurement, and you find out it was wrong on your own invoice. The fixed line is published; the metered lines depend on your traffic. Cloudflare's pricing is the only source that binds.
What it costs you that is not money.
This is where an open-source tool is genuinely more expensive than a hosted one. Pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon and ours.
Somebody has to deploy it once
Clone, set two secrets, run one command. An afternoon for an engineer who has met Cloudflare before, and a real blocker if there is no such person. This is the honest cost of the model, and it is not in dollars.
Somebody has to upgrade it
Pulling a release and redeploying is a five-minute job, but it is a job, and nobody will do it for you. Migrations are additive and checked in.
Support is an issue tracker
Open an issue and the people who wrote it answer it. No ticket queue, no response-time commitment, nobody contractually on the hook the week of your event. If you need that, buy something hosted.
Things that are line items elsewhere.
- Extra speakers, proposals, reviewers or committee members
- A second event, or last year's archived one
- Additional team seats or admin users
- The API, the webhooks, or a higher rate limit on either
- Getting your own data back out
- Single sign-on, when the adapter exists
- A feature held back for a higher tier — there are no tiers
- An activation code per conference occurrence
The ones that come up in the second meeting.
What is the catch? Where does the money come from?
There is none, because there is no company. Nothing is gated, there is no enterprise edition, and no feature is held back to make one.
Will the price change once we depend on it?
There is no price to change. The licence is irrevocable for the version you have, so the worst case is that development stops and you keep running the copy you deployed.
Do we pay more as the CFP grows?
Not to us, and barely to Cloudflare. The metered lines scale with traffic and storage, not with speakers, proposals, reviewers, events or team members. Four hundred submissions instead of forty does not move the bill.
Can we get our data out?
CSV export of everything, and a REST API with your own keys. No export ticket to raise, no format only we can read, and the database is in your account.
Can we pay someone to run it for us?
Nobody offers that today. It is an ordinary Cloudflare deployment, so an agency or contractor who works with Workers can operate it.
The cheapest way to find out is to go and use it.
No card, no form, no trial clock. Sign in as the program chair of a conference that is already halfway through its year.