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Conference Cost

Published: December 18, 2017

Conference Cost

In last weeks post we tantalised you with upcoming R & data science conferences, but from a cost point of view, not all R conferences are the same. Using the R conference site, it’s fairly easy to compare the cost of previous R conferences.

I selected the main conferences over the last few years and obtained the cost for the full ticket (including any tutorial days, but ignoring any discounts). Next, I converted all prices to dollars and calculated the cost per day.

Conference Cost($) #Days $per day
eRum 2016 30 3 10
satRday 2017 82 3 27
useR! 2017 770 4 192
R Finance 2017 600 2 300
rstudio::conf 2018 995 3 331
New York R 725 2 362
Earl London 1191 3 397

The conferences fall into two camps business oriented and more general R conferences; useR! is somewhere in the middle. A simple bar plot highlights the extreme difference in cost per day

The organisers of eRum and SatRdays should be proud of themselves for keeping the cost down; it would also be really useful if the organisers wrote a blog post giving more general tips for keeping the cost down.

I’m going to resist commenting on the conferences since I have only ever attended useR! (which is excellent), but in terms of speakers, most conferences have the same keynotes, so this year I’ll be looking at eRum 2018 (sadly useR! is a bit too far away from me).