Ale Retegan
LinkedIn
Ale Retegan Organizer

Alexandra is a dynamic and passionate individual who has taken on the role of the main organizer of JS Heroes. With a background in project management and a deep love for the tech industry, Alexandra has a keen eye for detail and an unwavering commitment to excellence, which means that no stone is left unturn and no piece of information about the event is tracked in a spreadsheet.

2023 Transparency Plan

During the last 7 years, JSHeroes became one of the biggest software development conferences in South-East Europe, and is one of the most popular tech events in Romania. For the 5th edition, we decided to come back to a two-day event, a format that used to be our way to go in a pre-pandemic world. The event will take place on May 18th and 19th, in Cluj-Napoca (18 & 19 May, 2023), and it is organized by JSHeroes, one of the most active JavaScript communities in Europe.

We strongly believe that the community model is the best environment for learning, so we are publishing all the data about this conference each year, in full transparency, to make it easier for other communities to build on our knowledge and organize even better events.

As you are already used to from our past Transparency reports, this is the part where we are going to talk about money. The estimated budget for the 2-day conference is 106.300 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 — 106.300 EUR
  • Profit — 0
  • Attendees — 550
  • Days — 2
  • Speakers — 19

Estimated expenses:

  • Staff — 0 EUR (our team of 18 people is working in their spare time to bring to life an event that once was just a dream)
  • Speakers (flight tickets, accommodation, leisure trip, gift bags, going out) — 34.8 K EUR
  • Venue + food & drinks (3 coffee breaks + 1 lunch for every attendee) — 40.7 K EUR
  • Photo-video services — 4.9 K EUR
  • Swag (stickers, badges), Promotional stuff (giveaways) — 2.5K EUR
  • Promotional campaigns - 500 EUR
  • Accounting services — 2.3K EUR
  • Other services that cannot be covered by volunteers (e.g.: design, sketching during the conference, operations) - 5.5K
  • Tools subscriptions (Sessionize) - 600 EUR
  • Venue services (Barista, Drinks, Photo Booth, LED screens) - 9.2 K
  • MC fees - 2K EUR
  • Transport (airport pick-up, transfers around the city)- 1K EUR
  • Fees (Ti.to, PayPal, Bank) - 2.5K 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 will have sold 450 tickets: 150 Early Bird tickets * 130 EUR, and 300 Regular tickets * 180 EUR —  Total: 73.5K 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 in organizing a great event) * 3.000 EUR/sponsorship package. So we need to have at least 10 sponsors to cover the basic costs.

In case there’s money left from this edition (as it usually happened with the previous ones), with the extra budget we want to continue the plans we made for helping the growth of a connected global community as follows:

  • Offer more tickets for our Diversity Tickets initiative
  • Offer more tickets in our Blood Campaign
  • Organize events for the community like the JSHeroes Bootcamp in November 2022
  • Support our local community meetup group

We are looking forward to seeing how this edition unfolds and plan to be back with news on the real budget soon after. If you are curious about other details or think there is anything we can help with, drop us a line, we would be glad to support you.