Expo Pass and event67: keep the badge desk, change the app

Expo Pass (Expo Pass is a trademark of Expo Pass, LLC) publishes a product anchored in what happens at the front of a venue. Its own site sets out event registration with flexible sign-ups and instant payments, onsite badge printing described as printing badges in seconds, check-in and attendance tracking, lead retrieval for booth staff, a mobile event application for iOS and Android, virtual and hybrid event hosting, CE certificates, custom email design and scheduling, an event website builder, and venue sourcing with group hotel booking (expopass.com, accessed 3 September 2026). The organiser-side check-in and badge printing run on iPads at the registration desk.

event67 covers none of the front of house. There is no printer integration, no kiosk, no consumable to order, no registration checkout and no lead retrieval — our QR scanning connects one attendee to another attendee and is never booth lead capture. What event67 does cover is the rest of the venue: the schedule people carry, the questions they ask, the polls they answer, the photographs they take and the console the organising team runs it all from. Two different problems, and only one of them is ours.

Two sourced points shape the arrangement. First, on branding: Expo Pass's public pages do not state whether its event application can be shipped under the organiser's own brand or store listing, and we could not source an answer either way on 3 September 2026 — so we make no claim about it, and neither should any comparison you read. What we can state about ourselves is that event67 publishes to the App Store and Google Play under the organiser's own name as the standard delivery rather than an upgrade, with logo, colours and typography running through every attendee screen and every colour pair checked against WCAG AA as an advisory that warns and confirms without ever blocking a save.

Second, on how each side is bought. Expo Pass's pricing page publishes a single starting figure and then builds a quote through a form or an email address; no tier names, per-attendee rates or ticket-fee schedule appear on it, badge and hardware consumables are sold separately through its shop, and no free tier is published (accessed 3 September 2026). event67 publishes a rate per activated attendee and a per-event ceiling that anyone can compute unaided, and gives away one live event up to 50 activated attendees with no card. The figures for both sides live in the table this page generates, not in this prose.

The onsite layer is the reason to buy Expo Pass, and event67 has no answer to any part of it. Its published product covers onsite badge printing, check-in and attendance tracking described as tracking every session automatically, and lead retrieval for capturing booth leads, with the organiser tooling running on iPads at the registration desk, and badge stock and hardware sold through its own shop (expopass.com, accessed 3 September 2026). If your conference has a badge queue, exhibitors expecting scanned leads, or session-level attendance that has to be certified, that is a hardware-and-logistics problem and we are a software product with no hardware at all.

The surrounding surface matters too. Expo Pass publishes event registration with instant payments, CE certificates, custom email design and scheduling, an event website builder, and venue sourcing with group hotel booking (accessed 3 September 2026). Several of those are hard exclusions for us: we take no payment, issue no certificates and track no continuing-education credit, our attendee web site is deliberately kept out of search indexes and cannot serve as a public marketing page, and we have nothing whatsoever to do with venues or hotel blocks. For an association whose annual meeting involves accredited sessions and a room block, a single vendor spanning that ground is a rational purchase and adding us to it is optional at most.

There is also the plain operational argument. One vendor means one contract, one implementation and one number to call at seven in the morning on show day. Running a second product introduces a seam, and seams need an owner. If nobody on your team has capacity to own that, the honest recommendation is to leave the arrangement as it is.

1. Leave the front of house alone

   Registration, payment, badge stock, printers and the iPads at the desk all stay exactly where they are. event67 neither replaces nor integrates with any of it, and pretending otherwise would create work rather than remove it.

2. Export the delegate list once it is firm

   Name, email and whichever profile fields belong in the attendee directory, as CSV. Import into the event67 console, and re-import as late registrations arrive — invites are unlimited and never metered, so repeats cost nothing.

3. Build the programme, then the brand

   Sessions, tracks, rooms, speakers and sponsors go into the console, with workshop capacities where you want server-side RSVP limits and automatic waitlist promotion. Then set logo, colours and typography, reading the WCAG AA advisory as each pair is checked.

4. Invite, run, and settle after the fact

   Bulk invites carry per-recipient delivery tracking. The console meter counts activated attendees from the day the event is published, the amount is emailed before any card is charged, and the charge lands 48 hours after the conference ends.

The uncomfortable part is that a delegate now touches two systems on the same morning: a printed badge from one and an app from the other, with no data flowing between them. Nobody scans the printed badge into event67 and nobody scans an event67 QR at the badge desk — the check-in you run at the door in event67 is a separate act against the same guest list. For most organisers that duplication is trivial, but for anyone hoping the app would tell them who collected a badge, it will not, and that expectation is better corrected now than at eight o'clock on the first morning.