I admit it's not as cheap as e.g. a Linux Expo, and the Python UK conference was cheaper (50/day) .. it could so easily be more!

Hi Adam,
We have had to increase the price of the conference to cover the cost of the venue and facilities at the venue. The last two years we have been able to secure a university lecture theatre due to one of the members being a lecturer at that uni - hence we could get the theatre room at a very cheap rate and attendant facilities. That option wasn't available to us this year.

Having found, after investigation, that booking lecture theatres in term time is not possible as the uni's themselves have them all booked (quite rightly). The options were to either move the day to a weekend (ruled out for various reasons which is the friday was originally chosen) or keep the established friday and find the best / cheapest option to hold the event in central London.

I'd love to only charge £50, but we have to break even to give us the option of holding one next year .i.e. we don't want to incur debts. The venue has a fire regs limit for 300 total and once you factor in speakers, helpers and sponsors, the actual delegate seats available means that £50 is not viable. Sponsors do help to mitigate the cost, but not totally.

We are a not for profit organisation, so our intention is _not_ to rip anyone off, least of all fellow php developers, but we do want the conference to be as good as it can be, hence the two tracks and locating everything at the same venue. You won't have to trek off to somewhere else for the network event afterwards and there will be a hot fork lunch this time. We also need to cover the speakers' costs to an extent.

I hope this clears things up a bit in terms of the price of tickets.

kind regards,
paul[dot]morgan{the AT sign}phplondon[dot]org
phplondon conference 2008
www.phpconference.co.uk