In last weeks post we tantalised you with upcoming R & data science conferences, but from a cost point 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

I think 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).

---