How much should you charge sponsors? A pricing method, not a magic number
8 June 2026 · 2 min read · Simple Sponsors team
Ask ten organizers how they priced their sponsorship tiers and eight will admit they guessed. Usually by copying another event’s deck and adjusting for confidence.
You can do better with an hour of work. Sponsorship pricing rests on three inputs: what you need, what comparable events charge, and what the exposure is worth to the sponsor. Where those three overlap is your price.
Input one: your cost floor
Add up the event budget and decide what share sponsorship must cover; the rest comes from tickets and other income. Divide that target across a realistic number of sponsors, weighted by tier. This is not your price yet, but it is your floor. Any tier priced below its share of the floor is a deal you cannot afford to close.
Input two: comparable events
Find three to five events of similar size, city, and audience, and learn what they charge. Public listings, organizer friends, and sponsors themselves are all sources; brands will often tell you what they paid elsewhere if you ask plainly.
You are not copying these numbers. You are locating the band the market already accepts, so your price needs no explanation, only justification at the edges.
Input three: value to the sponsor
Estimate what the sponsor would pay to reach your audience another way. A stall in front of two thousand relevant attendees, a logo seen across a two-day event, a speaking slot: sketch what similar attention costs in ads or activations in your city. Keep it rough and honest; the point is to sanity-check that your ask is defensible, not to produce a fake ROI report.
Set the number, then hold it
Price at the intersection: above your floor, inside the market band, defensible on value. Then resist the urge to discount at the first pushback. Resize the package instead, so the price you published stays true.
Publish the prices too. Listings with visible packages, like on Simple Sponsors, pre-filter for sponsors whose budgets fit, which means the conversations you do have are real ones.