The annual contract needs to die

If your event software is good enough, customers will stay without being contractually forced to. Annual contracts exist because vendors aren't confident that's true.

That's the whole argument. Everything else is justification.

The excuses

Vendors will tell you annual contracts are necessary. The two most common reasons: "we need predictable revenue" and "we invest heavily in onboarding, so we need commitment."

Translation: it's expensive for us to set up, and we're worried you'll leave once you see what the product is actually like to use day-to-day. So we'd rather lock you in before you find out.

That's not a business model. That's a hedge against your own product.

What annual contracts actually do

They don't protect the customer. They protect the vendor from having to keep earning your business. Here's what they create in practice:

They remove the incentive to improve. Once you've signed for 12 or 24 months, the vendor has your money. Whether they ship meaningful updates or coast on what exists, you're paying the same amount either way.

They lock you into a product you haven't properly tested. A demo isn't real usage. You don't know how a platform handles your actual workflows until you've run an event on it. By then, you're six months into a contract with six months left to endure.

They make switching financially painful. Even when the product isn't working for your team, the sunk cost of an annual contract keeps you stuck. You end up building workarounds instead of finding something better.

They turn renewals into sales conversations. When contract renewal comes around, you hear from the account manager — not the product team. The goal is to get you to re-sign, not to find out whether the product is actually solving your problems.

Flexibility is not risky

The counterargument is that flexible terms are risky for the vendor. Revenue becomes less predictable. Churn becomes visible.

That's the point. If customers are leaving every month, that's information you need. It means your product isn't good enough, your support isn't responsive enough, or your pricing doesn't match the value you deliver. A contract just hides those signals behind a wall of obligation.

Vendors with products people genuinely want to use do not need punitive contracts to retain customers. Committed terms can make sense when they fund onboarding, migration, support, and reserved capacity. They should not exist just to trap a team that would otherwise leave.

How ema handles this

ema packages start from $499/month. No per-seat fees. Your whole team can get access from day one, and committed terms should reflect real support, migration, and capacity needs.

We'd rather earn your business through useful software and practical support than lock you into a decision you made before you'd actually used the product. If a term exists, it should fund the work required to make the platform successful, not hide whether the product is useful.

The exception that proves the rule

Some organisations need annual contracts. Procurement teams have budget cycles. Finance departments need predictable line items. University purchasing systems don't process monthly SaaS subscriptions easily.

We get it. That's why we offer annual billing too. But it's a choice — a convenience for teams whose internal processes require it, not a requirement we impose because we're worried about retention.

The difference matters. "We offer annual billing because some customers prefer it" is entirely different from "you must commit to 12 months before you can use our product."

The rest of SaaS figured this out

This isn't a radical position. Most modern SaaS products — from project management to design tools to accounting software — default to monthly billing with an optional annual discount. It's the standard.

Event tech is behind. The industry still operates on enterprise sales cycles, long contracts, and pricing that requires a phone call to discover. That model protects vendors who can't compete on product quality alone.

Month-to-month pricing forces you to build something worth paying for every single month. We think that's how it should work.