Twenty years of running conferences, dealer meets and offsites throws up the same problems over and over. Most of them you solve with a person. A few you solve with software, and when the software we wanted did not exist, or cost more than the problem was worth, we built it.
These are not side projects looking for a market. Each one was built for a show we were running that week, then cleaned up and released because other people have the same show.
What event management tools does C4E build?
Five, and they serve different trades. Event Timer is a free countdown timer for conference speakers. The room capacity calculator works out how many people fit in a room once the stage and the bars have come out of it. The run of show generator builds the cue sheet the show is called from. The AV cost estimator adds up what an audio visual quote turns into once the service charge, the labour and the tax land on it. TUAP is a fair-pay and hiring tool for India’s film and creative crew. Everything else on our shows we buy.
All five came out of our own production work rather than a product roadmap. That is the whole selection rule, and it is why the list is short.
What is Event Timer?
A free fullscreen stage timer. Set the speaker’s slot, put it on the stage screen, and let the colours do the work: green while there is time, amber under two minutes, red under thirty seconds. At zero it sounds a gong, flashes TIME UP, and counts the overrun as a negative number so the chair knows how deep the session is.
No account, no install, no cost. It opens in a browser tab and it runs offline once loaded, which is the normal state of a hotel ballroom. Eight duration presets from three minutes to an hour, any custom length up to 24 hours, and keyboard control so a stage manager can drive it without looking at the laptop.
What Event Timer does, and how to run it on a show. Or open the timer and use it now.
What is the room capacity calculator?
A free tool that answers the question a venue capacity chart dodges: how many people fit in this room once you have put a show in it. Enter the room in feet or metres, pick a layout from theatre to hollow square, then take out the stage footprint, the front-of-house position, the bars, the buffet lines and the registration desks, plus a circulation buffer.
It returns two numbers rather than one. Comfortable is what you quote the client. Tight is what the room will take on the day forty extra people walk in. Every other free calculator we found returns a single number for an empty room, which is the number that loses you the argument on site.
Open the room capacity calculator. It is free to embed on your own site with one attribution link back.
What is the run of show generator?
A cue sheet builder. Put the start time in, list the segments with their durations, and it returns the clock time every item starts and ends, the running total, and how far past your hard stop the show sits. Move a segment and everything after it moves with it, which is the part that makes rundowns painful in a word processor.
Two things in it come from calling shows rather than from a template. Changeovers get their own rows, because a set change folded into the end of a keynote has no owner and happens in front of the audience. And the headline number is the overrun against the hard stop rather than the total runtime, because a venue curfew that bills by the quarter hour is the only constraint that changes anyone’s behaviour. Export to CSV for Excel, Sheets or the calling position.
Open the run of show generator. Free to embed, same as the rest.
What is the AV cost estimator?
The tool that tells you why the audio visual invoice is not the audio visual quote. Pick a published rate card, build a kit list or drop in your own subtotal, and it stacks the service charge, the set and strike labour, the technician time, the late-order premium and the tax in turn, then tells you how many times the equipment quote that adds up to.
Every default is lifted from a named, published document rather than from an industry average: the Baltimore Convention Center’s in-house exhibitor order form, the Chestnut Conference Centre price list at the University of Toronto, the Status AV card in the UK, and the Sands Expo service manual in Singapore. What it will not do is tell you what AV costs in your city, because nobody publishes that, and the page says so rather than inventing a number.
Open the AV cost estimator. Free to embed, one attribution link back.
What is TUAP?
Fair pay and real work for India’s film and creative crew. A rate benchmark so people know what to charge, verified credits so experience is legible, and hiring that does not run through a WhatsApp group. Free for creatives, invite-only while it is being built out.
TUAP is a C4E build and it is not an events tool, so it lives on its own domain. See TUAP.
Which event management tools do we buy instead of building?
Most of them. Registration and badging, ticketing, venue sourcing, delegate travel, and production timers for multi-stage shows are all bought off the shelf, on the client’s budget or ours. Those markets are well served, and a tool we wrote in a week would be a worse option than one somebody has spent five years on.
The clearest example is our own category. When a show has three stages and a showcaller driving timers from a control desk, we buy a production tool such as Stagetimer rather than stretch our own. We say so in the comparison, and the comparison is written by the people who make the free one.
What does an event tool have to survive on a show day?
Five things, and most software fails at least one of them. This is the list we test against before a tool goes anywhere near a live room.
It works when the network does not. Hotel wifi drops during the one session that matters. Anything whose core function needs a round trip to a server is a liability on a ballroom floor.
It runs on the venue’s machine. House AV laptops are locked down, three operating-system versions behind, and administered by someone who left. A browser tab runs. An installer does not.
It needs no login at the moment of use. Nobody is recovering a password at 09:58 while three hundred people find their seats. Anything gated behind an account has to be opened and signed in the night before or it is not on the show.
It is readable under pressure. A stage manager in a dark room with one hand on a radio is not reading a settings panel. Big targets, keyboard shortcuts, obvious states.
It fails loud. A tool that stops without saying so is worse than no tool, because the room keeps trusting it. When something breaks, the break has to be obvious enough that a human takes over.
How do we decide whether to build a tool or buy one?
Three questions, in order, and most ideas die on the first.
1/ Does it exist and does it work? If yes, buy it. Nothing about running events is improved by us maintaining software somebody else already maintains better.
2/ Does it exist but cost more than the problem? A per-seat subscription for a job we do four times a year is a bad trade, and so is a two-week build to avoid it. This is the question that kills the most ideas.
3/ Is it a job we do on every single show, that nobody has built for our shape of show? That is the one worth a weekend. Event Timer took a weekend because the job is one screen, one room, one chair who needs a clock working inside two minutes.
Can I use these on my own event?
Yes, and you need no permission from us. Event Timer is public. Open it, use it on your conference, use it on a client’s conference, use it on a show that competes with one of ours. There is no licence to accept, no attribution to display and no invoice coming.
What we do not offer is a support contract. If the timer breaks in your ballroom at nine in the morning, there is no number to call, and you should have a phone stopwatch and a person with a hand signal as the backup, the same way you would with any single point of failure on a show. That is the honest trade for free with no account.
Tell us if something is broken or missing and we will read it. We fix what bites us on our own events first, because that is the only promise we can keep. Get in touch.
What we have not built
No registration platform, no ticketing engine, no venue marketplace, no AI event planner. We have been asked about all four. Each one is a real business that we would run as a hobby, and a hobby product is worse than no product when somebody’s conference depends on it.
Neither of the two event tools needs an account. Event Timer and the room capacity calculator both open in a browser tab and run, and Event Timer does not ask for an email address to give you a clock. There is no roadmap page here either, because a roadmap is a promise about time we spend on events instead.
Do you build tools for clients?
We build what our own events need and release what generalises. If you have a production problem that software would fix, tell us and we will tell you whether it is worth building or whether something on the market already does it. That answer is free and it is often “buy the thing that exists”.
The related work we do sell is AI automation for event companies: seating charts, run books, MC scripts, badges and same-night client reports, built on your real event data rather than a demo.
If you want an event run rather than a tool to run it with, that is the actual business. Talk to us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are C4E’s event management tools free?
Event Timer, the room capacity calculator, the run of show generator and the AV cost estimator are all free, with no account and no install. TUAP is free for creatives and invite-only while it is being built out. None of the five has a paid tier.
Do I have to be a C4E client to use them?
No. The timer, the room capacity calculator, the run of show generator and the AV cost estimator are public and need nothing from you. We built them for our own conferences and released them because the problems are universal.
What is the best free event management tool for timing speakers?
Event Timer, which is ours, so read the comparison rather than the claim. It is a free fullscreen countdown timer that turns amber under two minutes, red under thirty seconds, sounds a gong at zero and counts the overrun. For a multi-stage production with a showcaller, buy a paid production tool instead.
Do you build custom event tools for clients?
We build what our own events need and release what generalises. If you describe the production problem, we will tell you whether it is worth building or whether something on the market already does it.
Why does C4E build software at all?
Because a few event problems are software problems and the market had priced them wrong for our shape of show. A free single-screen stage timer did not exist, so we wrote one for a conference we were running and kept using it.
Where does TUAP fit if it is not an events tool?
TUAP serves India’s film, ad and creative crew: rate benchmarks, verified credits and hiring. It came out of the same C4E group, and it sits on its own domain at tuap.in because the audience has nothing to do with corporate events.