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.
- 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.
Four resources, one secret, two commands.
Not a caveat. It is the reason the first line of that bill is zero.
- A D1 database, a KV namespace, an R2 bucket and three queues, in your account
- One Workers Secret — the key that signs unsubscribe links, so a speaker can leave a mailing list without signing in
- Your hostname in an environment variable; the app never learns it any other way
- A custom domain on the Worker, which is where your speakers arrive
npm run deploy:migrate
npm run deployThe first applies every migration to your database, the second puts the Worker up. Both read a config generated at deploy time, so there are no account ids in the repository you cloned and your first deploy cannot land in somebody else's database.
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.
Upgrades are yours to take
Pulling a release and redeploying is a five-minute job, but it is a job, and nobody will do it for you. Migrations are append-only and checked in, so the schema moves forward with the code.
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.
Nobody is watching it but you
Cloudflare's dashboard shows you the errors and the invoice. There is no status page to check and no vendor to email when something is slow at nine on a Monday.
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.