What Webinar Software Actually Costs in 2026: A Pricing Teardown

You open seven browser tabs to price webinar software and by tab four you’re annoyed. Two of them (ON24 and BigMarker) won’t show a number at all, just a “Request a demo” button. Two more (Zoom, GoTo) quote a price that sits on top of a base license you didn’t know you needed. By the time you find a figure you trust, you’ve lost an hour and still don’t know what you’ll pay.

Here’s the short answer: transparent webinar platforms run roughly $49 to $399 a month depending on room size, the “call us” enterprise tools (ON24, BigMarker) commonly land between $25,000 and $100,000+ a year, and the sticker price is almost never the real cost. The real cost is the base license Zoom makes you buy, the per-host multiplier Demio charges, the attendee credits Livestorm burns on replay viewers, and the 40-plus hours of automation no platform here builds for you. This teardown walks every vendor’s number, shows where each hides cost, and gives you a script to force a quote out of the demo-gated ones.

Table of contents

1. Why the sticker price is never the real price
2. The transparent tier: what you can price in five minutes
3. The hidden tier: the number ON24 and BigMarker won’t put on the page
4. How to force a real quote out of a demo-gated vendor
5. The cost nobody quotes: the automation you build yourself
6. Three real budgets: solo, mid-size, and enterprise
7. The compliance line item almost everyone forgets
8. Common objections, answered
9. FAQ

Why the sticker price is never the real price

Webinar software has four pricing models, and each hides cost in a different place. Learn them and you can spot the trap on any vendor’s page in thirty seconds.

• Per-room / per-plan (eWebinar, roughly Demio and GoTo). You buy a tier tied to a maximum room size. Easy to budget, until you outgrow the tier and the next one is a big step up.
• Per-host or per-organizer (Demio, GoTo Webinar). The advertised price is for one presenter. Add a second and you often pay again. Fine for a solo coach, expensive for a three-presenter team.
• Per-attendee credits (Livestorm). You buy credits, not seats, one credit per human. Plan the wrong pack size and you overpay or run dry mid-quarter.
• Add-on to a base license (Zoom Webinars). The price is bolted onto a paid Zoom Workplace plan you must already own, so the card price is not the invoice price.

Then there’s the fifth “model,” no model at all: quote-only. ON24 and BigMarker publish nothing, so you can’t compare or budget, and that opacity is itself a cost.

The transparent tier: what you can price in five minutes

These are the tools where the published number is close to what you’ll actually pay, all 2026 list prices from each vendor’s own page at the lower annual rate unless noted.

Demio is the clean coach’s pick: $49/month (about $42 annual) for 50 seats and one host, Growth $99 for 150. The catch is per-host pricing plus room-size steps, so a 500-seat Growth room runs around $234/month. Fair, but it climbs with headcount.

GoTo Webinar is the most transparent enterprise-adjacent tool, with four visible tiers: Lite $49/mo (250), Standard $99 (500), Pro $199 (1,000), Enterprise $399 (3,000), annual billing. The catch is “per organizer,” with source tracking gated to higher tiers.

eWebinar does only automated, evergreen webinars, no live, priced by how many you run: $99/month for one, up to $299 for unlimited, plus $49/month per extra 1,000 registrants. Wrong tool if you run live.

Zoom Webinars is the sticker-price trap in pure form. The add-on looks cheap, roughly $79/month for 300 seats, $95 for 500, but it requires a paid Zoom Workplace plan underneath (from about $13.33/month annual). The honest floor for a 500-attendee room is closer to $92/month.

Livestorm sells attendee credits, the model people misjudge most. Free gives 30 credits a year with a 30-minute cap; Pro is annual-only at about $3 per credit (roughly $1,200/yr for 400), and one credit is one participant per session. Buy too few and you throttle your growth mid-year; too many and you prepaid for attendance you never got.

The hidden tier: the number ON24 and BigMarker won’t put on the page

Now the two that make you call. Neither ON24 nor BigMarker publishes a price; the pricing URL is a demo-request form. It’s deliberate: quote-only pricing lets sales price to your budget and filters out small buyers before a human picks up.

So what do they cost? For ON24, the best public data comes from procurement marketplaces that aggregate real signed contracts. Vendr, on 77 verified purchases, reports a median around $38,750 per year, with most contracts between $25,000 and $100,000+ annually. On top of the license, expect setup fees commonly in the $5,000-$25,000 range and a 3-5% annual escalation clause on multi-year deals that you should negotiate to cap or remove.

BigMarker is harder to pin down, and I’ll be honest rather than invent a number. It steers every buyer to a demo, and while some aggregators list old SMB-style tiers, I could not confirm any current published price on BigMarker’s own site. Treat any “BigMarker costs $X” figure in a roundup as unverified until a rep puts it in writing, and assume it plays in the same custom-quote, annual-contract world as ON24.

How to force a real quote out of a demo-gated vendor

If you do sit through the demo, go in with the questions that turn a vague “it depends on your needs” into a number you can hold them to. Steal this verbatim:

These vendors hide pricing to keep the information asymmetry, and specific questions claw some of it back. If a rep won’t answer question one or seven, that tells you how the renewal goes.

The cost nobody quotes: the automation you build yourself

Here’s the line item that never shows up on a pricing page and is usually bigger than the software: the automation that turns a webinar platform into a webinar business. Every tool here puts people in a room. None, at its base price, does the things that actually make webinars pay:

• Instant registration confirmation and calendar hold.
• A multi-touch reminder cadence (email plus SMS) that drags show-up rate toward that 51.3% benchmark.
• No-show recovery that wins back the half who didn’t attend.
• Replay tagging so you know who watched and how far.
• A booking flow that gets a hot attendee onto a call while they’re warm, inside the window where you’re 7× more likely to qualify them.
• Attribution that ties a closed deal back to the webinar.

Wire all of that by hand and you’re looking at 40-plus hours the first time, across a registration funnel, triggers, tags, and a CRM. At any realistic rate that’s often the biggest cost of your first webinar, on top of the platform fee. It’s why two operators paying Demio the same $99 a month get wildly different results: one has the automation layer, the other has a room and a prayer.

That gap is what a system built on GoHighLevel is for: you keep the room you like and add the automation layer that no webinar platform includes. The GHL Webinar Snapshot installs that whole layer into your GoHighLevel account for a one-time $997, and we handle the migration off a legacy tool.

Three real budgets: solo, mid-size, and enterprise

The right number depends on who you are. Run “what does webinar software cost me?” through three operators and you get three different answers.

The solo coach or course seller

One evergreen funnel or occasional live class, 50 to 150 attendees, list under a couple thousand. Your budget:

For you, an ON24 quote would be malpractice. Your edge isn’t the platform, it’s the reminder cadence and follow-up, because at your scale a 10-point swing in show-up rate decides whether a launch pays.

The mid-size B2B team

Regular live and evergreen webinars, 500 to 1,000 attendees, measured on pipeline:

Here the per-host and per-organizer models bite, so count presenters first, and attribution stops being optional: if you can’t tie registrants to closed pipeline, finance questions the spend. GoTo’s transparent 1,000-seat tier plus real multi-touch attribution beats an opaque enterprise contract here.

The enterprise demand-gen org

High-volume, large-audience broadcasts, sometimes compliance-heavy (healthcare, finance), with a team and procurement. This is the one segment where ON24 or BigMarker can genuinely be right:

Even here, the automation and attribution still has to be built or bought: the platform gives you broadcast infrastructure and analytics, not your reminder-and-booking workflow. At this scale the six-figure fee is justified by audience size and security. Below it, rarely.

The compliance line item almost everyone forgets

There’s one more cost that never appears on a pricing page and can dwarf all of them if you get it wrong: compliance on your reminders. Most of your reminders run over SMS, which is exactly where the rules live.

If you text registrants in the US, you’re under the TCPA, and to send at volume you need a registered A2P 10DLC campaign with documented consent. The phone-number field on your registration page needs a clear, unbundled opt-in, and every message needs a working opt-out. Skip it and you’re not looking at a line item, you’re looking at per-message statutory penalties. If you record attendee audio or video, two-party consent states (California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois and others) add another layer.

None of that is legal advice, so run your specifics past a TCPA-aware attorney. But budget for it as real work: consent language, campaign registration, opt-out handling. Our SMS reminder compliance guide covers it in plain English.

Common objections, answered

“Isn’t the cheapest platform just fine? Why overthink it?” For a solo operator, close to yes. The mistake isn’t overpaying for the room; it’s underspending on the automation and then blaming the platform when show-up rate sits at 30%. The reminder cadence, no-show recovery, and follow-up are where the money is, and none of it is included at any tier.

“I already pay for Zoom. Doesn’t that make it free?” Cheaper, not free. You still add the webinar module on top of your Workplace license, so a 500-seat room is roughly $92/month all-in, not the $79 sticker. And Zoom gives you a room, not a funnel: no registration nurture, no replay tagging, no booking flow. Keep Zoom if you like it, and add the automation layer on top.

“Do I need an expensive enterprise tool to be compliant or secure?” No. Compliance is about your consent process and data handling, not your logo tier. A solo coach on Demio with a registered A2P campaign and clean opt-ins is more compliant than an enterprise on ON24 that never set up consent. Enterprise platforms buy scale and security certifications, not compliance. That’s on your process.

“Why won’t ON24 and BigMarker just show a price?” Because opacity is profitable. Quote-only pricing lets them price to your budget instead of a public rate card, and it screens out small buyers before a salesperson spends time on them. It’s rational for them and a disadvantage for you, which is why the seven-question script above exists. Go in prepared or don’t go in.

FAQ

About the author

Derek Haywood is a GoHighLevel Automation Engineer based in Denver, CO. A former B2B SaaS sales engineer, he builds the plumbing behind webinar funnels: tags, triggers, lead scoring, and the replay-tag pipelines that surface buyers without manual CSV scrubbing. He has a low tolerance for broken automations and vendors who won’t put a price on the page.

Related reading

• Snapshot vs DIY: The Real Cost of Building Webinar Automation Yourself
• How to Calculate Webinar ROI: The Formula, Benchmarks & the Metric That Predicts It
• Webinar Benchmarks 2026: Show-Up Rates & Conversion Data
• How to Migrate Your Webinar Funnel to GoHighLevel
• Why Show-Up Rate Is the Only Webinar Metric That Actually Compounds
• SMS Reminder Compliance for Webinars (TCPA + A2P 10DLC, Plain English)

Sources

• Demio, Pricing
• GoTo Webinar, Pricing
• eWebinar, Pricing
• Zoom, Webinars
• Livestorm, Pricing
• ON24, Pricing (demo-gated)
• BigMarker
• Vendr, ON24 marketplace pricing data
• Livestorm, 2026 Webinar Benchmark Report
• MarketingProfs, B2B Thought Leadership Content Trends for 2026
• Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads