Choosing an event registration tool looks like a feature comparison and turns out to be a pricing comparison. The feature lists converge fast. Every serious option builds a form, sends a confirmation, and exports a spreadsheet. What actually separates them is the unit they meter, because the unit decides whether a successful event costs more than a quiet one, and whether the tool that fits a fifty person workshop still fits when four hundred people sign up.
Three units are in circulation. Ticketing platforms meter tickets. Form builders meter responses. A smaller group meters seats, meaning the number of staff who log in. The choice between them is not about which is cheapest in the abstract. It is about which one stays predictable when the event goes well.
The three ways registration tools are priced
Per ticket. A percentage of the ticket price plus a flat amount, charged on every paid ticket sold. Eventbrite, as of today, charges a 3.7% plus $1.79 service fee per ticket on paid tickets, and a 2.9% payment processing fee per order. Free events carry no ticketing platform fee, and free events can be published without limit. The model is attractive because nothing is owed until money comes in, and painful because the bill scales with success. A four hundred ticket event at $50 a head pays roughly $1,456 in service fees before payment processing.
Per response. A monthly plan that includes a fixed number of submissions. Typeform's free plan includes 10 responses per month across all forms, and its Basic plan at $39 per month includes 100 responses per month with one user. Jotform's free Starter plan allows 5 forms and 100 monthly submissions, with Bronze at $34 per month billed annually raising that to 25 forms and 1,000 monthly submissions. The model is predictable in a flat month and hostile in a spiky one, which is exactly what event registration is. Registration does not trickle. It arrives in two bursts, one when the announcement goes out and one in the final week.
Per user. A monthly plan priced on how many staff need access, with forms and responses uncapped. The bill moves when the team grows, not when the event fills. For a registration workload this is the only one of the three whose cost is uncorrelated with the thing being measured.
Why the unit matters more than the headline price
A $39 plan with a 100 response cap and a $39 plan with no cap are not competing products. The first one is a trial that happens to charge money, for anything larger than a training session. The relevant number is not the monthly price. It is the price of the month in which the event actually happens.
What a ticketing platform is really selling
Per ticket pricing buys something real, and it is worth naming before dismissing it. A ticketing platform handles payment collection, refunds, chargebacks and payouts. It issues scannable tickets. It provides a check in app. And it runs a marketplace, which is the part that justifies the fee for consumer events: listings are discoverable, and some share of attendance comes from people who were browsing rather than invited.
If the event is a public paid event and the audience is not already a mailing list, that discovery is worth paying for. The service fee is a customer acquisition cost with a different name.
If the audience is already known, none of that applies. An internal training day, a members only briefing, a webinar promoted to existing customers, a community meetup announced on a mailing list: for all of these the marketplace adds nothing, and the per ticket fee is being paid for payment handling that a payment processor would do for less. Eventbrite also sells a Pro plan starting at $15 per month for organisers who need to send up to 10,000 emails daily, which is the tell that marketing volume, not registration, is the product being upgraded.
The question to settle before comparing anything else is therefore simple. Is the event trying to be found, or is it trying to be organised? Tools built for the first are expensive at the second.
Where general form tools sit
Form builders are cheaper and more flexible, and their limits are placed somewhere less obvious. Google Forms is free with a Google account and has no monthly response cap. It now supports closing a form on a date or after a set number of responses, which covers the basic capacity problem, with one documented caveat worth knowing before relying on it for a sold out event: if multiple people respond at the exact same time, the form accepts responses regardless of the response limit. Its practical ceilings arrive much later, at 50,000 responses for the response summary and 100,000 for syncing to Sheets.
Typeform and Jotform are polished, and both meter submissions. Typeform's free plan is generous on forms and strict on volume, at 10 responses per month across the whole account, and when the limit is reached the forms go into private mode until the next month begins or the account is upgraded. Jotform's free plan allows 100 monthly submissions with 500 total submission storage.
Here is how the metering compares for a single event that takes 400 registrations in one month.
| Tool | What is metered | Free tier | Cost at 400 registrations in one month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | Paid tickets | Unlimited free events, no platform fee | No platform fee if tickets are free; 3.7% + $1.79 per paid ticket plus 2.9% per order if not |
| Google Forms | Nothing, until very large volumes | Free with a Google account | Free |
| Typeform | Responses per month across all forms | 10 responses per month | Above the 100 per month included in Basic at $39, so a higher plan or add-on responses |
| Jotform | Monthly submissions and number of forms | 5 forms, 100 monthly submissions | Above Bronze at $34 per month billed annually, so Silver at $39 billed annually or higher |
| Per user form tool | Number of staff with access | Varies by product | Unchanged by the 400 registrations |
The table is about cost shape, not about quality. All of these collect registrations competently. The row that changes when the event succeeds is the row to be careful with.
The half of the job that no pricing page meters
Registration does not end when the form is submitted. It ends when the attendee walks through the door, and between those two moments sit a confirmation, a payment check if the event is paid, a waitlist promotion if it filled, a reminder a week out, a reminder the day before, and a check in list that reflects cancellations received that morning.
Pricing pages meter the first step and stay quiet about the rest, which is why tools that look comparable feel wildly different in week three. The work of the second half is not form building. It is knowing, for each person, what state their registration is in and who is dealing with it.
Two questions separate the tools that help from the tools that do not.
Can a single registration carry a status and an owner? Confirmed, waitlisted, cancelled, paid, attended, no show. A spreadsheet can hold a column named status, but it has no opinion about what a valid status is and no memory of who changed it. A tool that models status keeps the list honest without a weekly reconciliation. The features page is where this should be checked on any candidate, because it is rarely mentioned on the pricing page.
Can a reply be sent from the same screen as the response, and is it recorded? Most registration failures are communication failures. Somebody was told they had a place and the list said otherwise, or a reminder went to a cancelled registrant, or nobody can tell whether the room change notice reached the person asking about it. If the answer to any of those requires searching a shared inbox, the process has a seam, and the seam is where the cost sits. It does not appear on any invoice, but it is paid for in the hours before every event.
Free events change the calculation entirely
A large share of event registration is for free events: internal sessions, community meetups, webinars, open days, information evenings. For those, per ticket pricing is not a cost at all, because there are no paid tickets. Eventbrite is free for free events, and so is Google Forms.
That makes the decision for free events a pure operations question. Nothing is being bought except the handling of the list. And it exposes how badly the per response model fits, because a free event with 400 registrations generates 400 submissions that produce no revenue to offset a plan upgrade. The worst outcome in that situation is a form that stops accepting responses mid campaign because a monthly cap was reached, which is a real behaviour on metered plans, not a hypothetical.
For a free event with an unpredictable turnout, the safe shapes are a tool with no response cap or one priced on staff rather than volume. The pricing page of any candidate should be read with one question in mind: what happens on the day 400 people sign up and none of them pays anything.
How to run the comparison in an afternoon
Shortlisting is faster with a fixed procedure than with a feature matrix.
Start by writing down the largest single event expected in the next twelve months, in registrations, and whether tickets are paid. That number is the test input for every plan page. Ignore the monthly price and calculate the cost of that one month on each candidate.
Next, build the actual registration form in the two strongest candidates. Not a demo form, the real one, with the real questions. Fifteen minutes each is enough to discover which editor fights back, and free tiers are sufficient for this.
Then submit three test responses to each and look at the screen where they land. This is the step that is usually skipped and the one that decides the next twelve months. Look for whether the response can be assigned, whether it can carry a status, whether a reply can be sent from that screen, and whether that reply stays on the record. A live demo is faster than a trial account for this specific check, because the interesting screen is the one after submission rather than the builder.
Finally, check the export. Every tool will need to hand its data to something else eventually, whether a badge printer, an accounting system or the next tool. A CSV that contains the internal fields as well as the answers is the difference between a clean handover and an afternoon of copying.
What to change first
Take the last event and find the moment where a question about one attendee required looking in two places. That seam is worth more attention than the price comparison, because it is the part that repeats at every event regardless of which tool is chosen. Put the registration and the conversation about it on the same record, then reprice. Halict is priced on the number of people using it rather than the number of registrations taken, which keeps the bill still when the event fills.
Q1. Is Eventbrite free to use for a free event?
Yes. Eventbrite states that free events carry no ticketing platform fee and that unlimited free events can be published at no cost. Fees apply to paid tickets, at 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket, along with a 2.9% payment processing fee per order.
Q2. Can Google Forms cap registrations at a set number?
It can. Under Accepting responses there is a setting to close the form on a date or after a number of responses. Google documents one exception: if multiple people respond at the exact same time, the form accepts responses regardless of the response limit, so a hard capacity limit still needs checking by hand.
Q3. What happens when a form tool's monthly response limit is reached?
It depends on the product, and the behaviour is worth reading before an event. On Typeform, reaching 100% of the response limit puts the forms into private mode until the next month begins or the account is upgraded, and deleted responses do not free up allowance.
Q4. Should a paid event use a ticketing platform or a form tool?
A ticketing platform earns its fee when discovery matters, because the marketplace brings attendees who were not invited. When the audience is already a mailing list or a membership, the fee is paying for payment handling alone, and a form tool connected to a payment processor is usually cheaper.
Q5. How many fields should an event registration form have?
As few as change what happens on the day. Name, email, and anything that alters catering, access or badge printing. Job title and how the attendee heard about the event can be asked afterwards in a follow up survey, where an unanswered question costs nothing.