Free event registration platforms are easy to find and hard to compare, because the word free is doing at least three different jobs across the market. On one platform it means every free event is free forever with no platform fee. On another it means a monthly allowance of registrations that a single busy week will exhaust. On a third it means the software is free and the payment processing is not.
The practical question is not which platform is free. It is which limit the next twelve months of events will hit, and what happens on the day it does. Some caps degrade gracefully by asking for an upgrade. Others stop accepting registrations, which for an event with a printed date is a different kind of problem. The numbers below are the list prices and published limits on each vendor's own pages at the time of writing.
Three different meanings of free
The first meaning is free for free events. Eventbrite publishes unlimited free events at no cost, with no ticketing platform fee, and charges only on paid tickets. For a community programme that never sells a ticket, this is genuinely free at any volume, and the trade is that the event sits on a public marketplace.
The second meaning is freemium with a cap. Most form-led and registration-led tools work this way, and the cap is placed just below the size of a real event. RSVPify's free plan allows 100 registrations a month and one event at a time. Jotform's Starter plan allows 5 forms with 100 submissions a month and 500 submissions in total. Eventleaf is free up to 100 attendees a year across unlimited events and unlimited users, which is a yearly allowance rather than a monthly one. Each of those is a fully working product until the number arrives.
The third meaning is free with the cost moved somewhere else. SignUpGenius is free with unlimited sign-up pages and includes payment collection, confirmation emails, and reminders on the free tier, with advertising shown on the pages and an allowance of 1,000 email invitations or group messages a month. The software costs nothing and the attention of the attendee pays for part of it.
Knowing which of the three a platform is telling gets the comparison to a useful starting point. A cap measured per year behaves very differently from the same number measured per month.
The caps, side by side
| Platform | What free includes | The limit that bites | First paid tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | Unlimited free events, no ticketing platform fee | Applies to free tickets only. Paid tickets carry 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket and 2.9% payment processing per order | Fees per ticket rather than a subscription, with extra email sending from $15 a month |
| Eventleaf | Up to 100 attendees a year, unlimited events, unlimited users | The allowance is cumulative across the year, so four events of thirty people exhaust it | From $1 per attendee, with 500 attendees included for $500 a year |
| RSVPify | 100 registrations a month, 1 event at a time, 100 invited guests per event | One event at a time, which blocks any overlap between a current event and the next one | Starter at $39 a month, or $24 a month billed yearly, for 150 registrations a month |
| SignUpGenius | Unlimited sign-up pages, payments, reminders, 1,000 emails a month, with advertising | Custom questions and waitlist management are not included | Silver at $8.99 a month billed annually, with waitlist management from Gold at $22.49 a month |
| Jotform | 5 forms, 100 submissions a month, 500 submissions in total, 100MB of uploads | The total submission cap, which does not reset monthly | Bronze at $39 a month for 1,000 submissions a month |
| Google Forms | Free with a Google account, answers in a spreadsheet | No capacity closing, no attendee status, no waitlist order | No event tier. The gap is filled with spreadsheet work |
Two entries in that table deserve a second look. Jotform's free plan has both a monthly cap and a lifetime total, so an account that has collected 500 submissions across a year of small events is full even in a quiet month. Eventleaf's allowance is per year and per attendee rather than per registration, which suits one annual conference and does not suit a monthly meetup.
Which limit an event hits first
Four different limits exist in this market, and only one of them usually matters for a given organiser.
Volume per month is the limit for anyone running a single sizable event. A workshop for 120 people is past the free tier of most freemium platforms on the day the invitation goes out, and the upgrade has to happen mid-campaign, which is the worst possible moment to be entering card details.
Volume per year is the limit for anyone running a programme of small events. Twelve monthly meetups of twenty five people is 300 attendees, which is comfortably inside every monthly cap and well past a yearly allowance of 100.
Concurrency is the limit people notice last and resent most. A free plan permitting one event at a time is unusable for any organisation where the next event opens for registration before the current one has happened, which is normal practice. Upgrading for concurrency alone is common.
The email allowance is the quiet fourth limit. Four messages per registrant is the working minimum for an event: confirmation, a reminder a day out, the day-of details, and a follow-up. An event with 400 registrations therefore needs 1,600 sends, which is above several free allowances before any promotion is considered. Check the allowance in messages rather than in campaigns, since one send to a list of 400 counts as 400.
What stays paid even on a free plan
Payment processing is the main one. Free platform, paid processing is the norm, and the fees are a larger line than any subscription for a paid event. SignUpGenius lists card payments at 3.95% plus $0.95 across every tier, including the free one. Eventbrite lists 3.7% plus $1.79 per paid ticket alongside 2.9% payment processing per order, and passes those to the buyer by default unless the organiser chooses to absorb them.
For an event selling a $40 ticket to 200 people, fees of that shape run into several hundred dollars, which dwarfs the cost of any subscription tier under discussion. On any event that takes money, work out the fees before comparing platform prices, because the subscription is usually the smaller number.
Two other costs are not money. Branding on the form and in the confirmation email is standard on free tiers and removed on the first or second paid tier. Advertising on the sign-up page is a specific case of this, disclosed on the pricing page, and it is worth looking at a live example before deciding whether it matters for a professional audience.
The third hidden cost is the pricing model itself rather than any single number. A platform that charges per registration makes a successful event more expensive, which is a strange incentive for an organiser whose job is to fill the room. A platform priced by the number of people who administer it, with no cap on responses, prices the opposite way round.
The features held back on purpose
Free tiers are rarely crippled at random. The features held back tend to be the ones that only matter once an event is real.
Capacity limits are the clearest example. Closing registration automatically at a number is the difference between a full room and an apology, and on RSVPify capacity limits sit on the Plus plan, listed at $125 a month or $89 a month billed yearly. Waitlist management is the same story, appearing on SignUpGenius from the Gold plan at $22.49 a month billed annually.
Custom questions are another. A registration form that cannot ask which session, whether a meal is needed, or what access requirements apply is not a registration form, and several free tiers either allow none or allow two. Check-in tooling is commonly reserved for paid tiers too, which is reasonable, since check-in only matters on the day.
The last one is other people. Free tiers are usually single-user, and an event run by two people with one login has no record of who did what. Additional administrators appear well up the tiers on most platforms, which is the point at which a per-user price with no volume cap starts to look different rather than more expensive. The questions people ask page covers how that shape works in practice.
How to test a free tier in an afternoon
Sign up and run one rehearsal before the real page is built. Free tiers exist precisely so this is possible, and an hour spent here removes most of the risk of choosing wrongly.
Create the event with the real questions, including the session choice and the access requirement field, then register as an attendee from a phone rather than from a desktop. Read the confirmation email that arrives and check whether it restates the answers or merely says thank you. A confirmation without the details is a confirmation the attendee will email about.
Then break it deliberately. Cancel the registration and see whether the place is freed. Register twice with the same email address and see whether the platform allows it, blocks it, or creates two records. Change the attendee's name on an existing registration, which is how corporate substitutions arrive. Set the capacity to one, register, and look at the page a second person now sees. Export the list and check whether internal notes come out in the same row as the answers.
Six checks, one afternoon, and they surface the differences no feature grid shows. They also answer the question that matters more than any limit, which is what the platform does when something goes wrong rather than when everything goes to plan.
Keep the rehearsal event afterwards. When the free tier is eventually outgrown, the same six checks run against two paid candidates make a decision in an hour rather than a week of reading comparison pages. The features list of any candidate is a claim, and the rehearsal is the test of it.
Free plus a spreadsheet, and when it stops
The most common real-world setup is a free form, a spreadsheet, and a mailbox. It works, and it works for longer than most vendors admit, so it is worth naming the three points at which it stops.
It stops when a second person joins. Two people editing one spreadsheet and replying from separate mailboxes will contact the same registrant twice within a week, and neither will know.
It stops when capacity binds. Counting rows to decide whether the room is full is fine at forty and unreliable at four hundred, particularly with cancellations, substitutions, and duplicate entries in the same sheet.
It stops when the same people come back. Across a programme of events, the useful question is whether this person attended before, and a spreadsheet per event cannot answer it. Where each registration is a record keyed on the email address, that history builds itself.
Until those three arrive, a free tier plus disciplined habits is a rational choice, and the discipline that matters most is one list rather than several exports.
What to change first
Write out the next twelve months of events with headcounts, then check that plan against the four limits above: volume per month, volume per year, events at once, and emails per month. If it breaks on any of them, price the paid tier of the free platform against a tool priced by the number of organisers instead, and test the handling of a cancellation and a waitlist promotion before committing, which is what Halict is worth running a real sign-up through.
Q1. Is any event registration platform genuinely free with no limits?
For free events, Eventbrite publishes unlimited free events with no ticketing platform fee, which is as close as the market gets. Everything else attaches a limit somewhere: registrations per month, attendees per year, events at a time, emails per month, or the number of people who can administer the account. The fee structure on paid tickets is separate and applies regardless of the plan.
Q2. What happens when a free plan's registration cap is reached mid-event?
That depends on the platform, and it is the single most important thing to check before publishing a page. Some queue submissions or allow a grace overage, while others simply stop accepting, which means genuine attendees see an error. Find the answer in the vendor's own documentation rather than assuming, because the failure lands on the busiest day of the campaign.
Q3. Do free plans allow payment collection?
Often yes, with processing fees applying at the same rate as on the paid tiers. SignUpGenius lists card payments at 3.95% plus $0.95 on every tier including the free one. Those fees are usually a bigger number than any subscription for an event that sells tickets, so they belong in the comparison from the start.
Q4. Is Google Forms enough for event registration?
For a small free event where the only requirement is collecting names, it is. It does not close registration at a capacity number, does not hold a waitlist in order, and does not give a registration a status or an owner, so all of that becomes spreadsheet work. The moment two people share the handling, that spreadsheet is where the mistakes happen.
Q5. When is it worth leaving a free plan?
When a second person shares the work, when capacity has to close automatically, or when the same attendees return across a programme of events. Those three conditions are what free tiers are designed not to cover, and they arrive together more often than not.