JSHeroes 2019 — Transparency report

In 2 years, JSHeroes became one of the biggest dev conferences in South-East Europe and is one of the most popular tech events in Romania. For this year we’ve prepared a more ambitious plan than for the past editions. We will have a Festival week, with more activities besides the day full of Workshops and two Conference days, with the help of more than 20 international and local JavaScript experts and we’re expecting between 600 and 700 attendees.

The event will take place at Grand Hotel Italia, in Cluj-Napoca, and it’s organized by JSHeroes (ex Cluj Javascripters), one of the most active JS communities in Europe. We strongly believe that the community model is the best environment for learning, so we’re publishing all the data about this conference, in full transparency, to make it easier for other communities to build on our knowledge and organize even better events.

This time we’re going to talk about money. The estimated budget for the 2 conference days is 92.600 EUR. Why?

The expenses presented below could shed some light on what organizing a conference means in terms of costs (but not only):

Summary:

• Cost — 92.600 EUR
• Profit — 0
• Attendees — 700
• Days — 2
• Speakers — 20

Expenses:

• Staff — 0 EUR (20 volunteers are working to bring to life an event that once was just a dream)
• Speakers (flight tickets, accommodation, trip, gift bags) — 30.5K EUR
• Venue + food & drinks (3 coffee breaks/day + 1 lunch/day for every attendee) — 38K EUR
• Photo-video services — 2.8K EUR
• Swag (stickers, badges), Promotional stuff (giveaways) — 5.6K EUR
• Promotional campaigns — 1.1K EUR
• Accounting services — 800 EUR
• Other services that cannot be covered by volunteers (e.g.: design, sketching during the conference) — 5.5K
• Tools subscriptions (CFP, hosting) — 800 EUR
• Venue services & design (Stage design — LED TVs, lights, Barista, Photobooth) — 4.5K
• Fees (Ti.to, PayPal, Bank) — 2K EUR
• Discounts for other communities, free Diversity tickets, Blood campaign donation — 1K EUR

How do we plan to pay for all these things?

• Tickets — after estimating the costs, we calculate the tickets price so as to cover the conference price but to keep our non-profit scope. We assumed that we have 580 tickets sold: 300 Early bird tickets * 99 EUR+VAT, 300 Regular tickets * 149 EUR + VAT — Total: 74K EUR
• Sponsors — whose only interest is to help the community grow by paying a fee for a special sponsorship package, recruitment-free, with only a few benefits as our purpose is not to get any kind of profit out of this but to get some help to organize a great event) * 2.000 EUR/sponsorship package
• Extra money left from the previous edition — 15K EUR

Due to a good management of last editions’ budget, this year we could start organizing 2019’s edition with less stress regarding the money. Anyway, if this year’s budget will look as good as the one for the previous edition’s in the end, with the extra money we want to continue the plans we made for helping the growth of a connected global community as follows:

• Donate money for education, especially for over-achieving kids
• Support the open source industry by donating money for projects from Open Collective (e.g.: CodeSandbox, ESLint)
• Organise the Node School event (2 events/year)
• Invite further JS experts to the Cluj JavaScripters Meetups
• Travel to speak about the JavaScript community in Cluj, to other geographic areas (that’s good for business, for all companies).

They say “no plan goes according to the plan” but we’ll let you know how this one went after the conference, so keep an eye on our blog. Or, if you are curious to find out more details that we can include in a blog post, don’t be shy, drop us a line anytime, we’d be happy to answer.