The Challenge
Conference apps have a credibility problem. Organizers pay for a seat count months before anyone walks through the door, attendees download a generic app that looks nothing like the event they registered for, and half of the people on the guest list never open it. The vendors know this. Their pricing depends on it.
Meanwhile the attendee experience keeps getting harder to run well. A schedule changes the night before. A keynote room needs live questions and polls. Sponsors expect visibility. A photo stream needs somebody to moderate it at three in the afternoon on day two.
Where It Comes From
event67 continues a thread that runs through my education and events work. Meet Your Mentor engineered the composition of a table and rotated it on a timer. Fair Hands Up gave every voice in a Rotman classroom a fair turn. Both proved the same thing: give a room one honest source of shared context and the room runs itself.
event67 takes that conviction from a table of six to a ballroom of a thousand, and builds it with the same rigor I bring to aviation systems that must hold up through irregular operations. A conference is a peak period that lasts two days, with one chance to get it right.
The Solution
event67 is a branded conference companion that attendees download under the organizer's own name, paired with a console that runs the whole event from one screen. The logo, colors and typography of the event flow through every view, and every color pair is checked against WCAG AA so the theme stays readable on stage and on a phone.
The positioning line is short: Your conference, polished. The product does the attendee experience thoroughly instead of doing nine categories adequately.
For Attendees
Live schedule and My Picks: Sessions grouped day by day with tracks, rooms and speaker bios. Attendees star the sessions they care about and pin them to the top of their own agenda.
Networking by QR: Scan another attendee in person to connect, or browse the directory and send a request. Profiles carry a photo, interests and links the attendee controls.
Live engagement: Questions with upvotes, polls answered from the session screen, crowd reactions during keynotes, and session ratings that go straight to the organizer.
Shared photo album: Attendees add photos from camera or library into a moderated event album with a full screen viewer.
Passes and shortcuts: An event badge in Apple Wallet, a Live Activity on the Lock Screen, a Home Screen widget, and Siri shortcuts that answer questions like "what is my next session" out loud.
For Organizers
One console for everything: Events, sessions, tracks, rooms, speakers and sponsors, with bulk invites imported from CSV and delivery tracked per recipient.
Door check in: Scan an attendee's QR badge at the entrance and watch live arrivals climb against the guest list.
Moderation and announcements: Approve photos and questions before they reach the room. Publish an announcement now or schedule it to push at a set time.
Engagement analytics: Active attendees, funnels and top sessions, live while the event is running, plus an end of event archive of every question, poll and photo.
Team chat, email campaigns, forms and tracked links: The operational layer that usually lives across four other tools.
Pricing Built Around Attendance
An attendee is activated only when they claim their invite and open the app. Not when they are imported, not when the invite is delivered, and not if they register and stay home. The first 50 activated attendees at every event are free. Each activated attendee after that costs five US dollars, and the price stops moving at one thousand attendees, so the most an organizer can ever pay for one event is $4,750. Every price on the public site is generated from the same code the product bills from.
What It Deliberately Does Not Do
event67 does not sell tickets, print badges, stream video, run a call for papers, match people by AI or gamify attendance. That boundary is published on the website, it is the same list the marketing copy is checked against, and it is a scope decision rather than a roadmap. I have argued elsewhere that AI is a lens rather than a magic wand, and a conference hallway is a place where two people who chose to talk beat any algorithm.
Architecture
The platform is a monorepo with a Fastify and TypeScript API on Google Cloud Run, PostgreSQL on Neon through Kysely with versioned migrations, and Firebase for authentication, Firestore, Storage, push notifications and hosting. The attendee app is Flutter for iOS and Android with a React web event site, the organizer console is React, and the public site is Astro. Stripe handles billing, OpenTelemetry carries a trace through every request, architecture decisions live in dated records inside the repository, and a versioned partner API ships with a generated OpenAPI spec and a changelog rule enforced by the test suite.
Cloud native from the first commit rather than migrated there later. It is the transformation over migration principle from my enterprise work, applied with no legacy to carry.
Results
- Published to the App Store and Google Play under the organizer's own brand
- Multitenant from day one, with four staff roles from platform staff to per event moderators
- Zero cost for small gatherings and a hard ceiling for large ones
- One person builds the product and answers the support email, which keeps every published claim honest
Read the full story in Why I Built event67.