As of October 2026, a B2B webinar platform costs from $37 a month billed yearly (ClickMeeting, 50 attendees) to $83.33 a month for Zoom Webinars at 500 attendees before its required Workplace Pro license, and buyers in Vendr’s data paid a median of $27,590 a year for Goldcast and $39,350 for ON24. The license is the easy part to price. I’ve produced more than a thousand enterprise B2B webinars, and the numbers that matter are the fully loaded cost of an event and what that works out to per attendee.
Platform pricing pages will tell you a webinar costs $79 a month, which is what Riverside’s Webinar plan costs billed yearly. That is pricing a wedding by the cost of the invitations. Below is the full line-item budget, a way to cost the parts no pricing page shows, the cost per lead math at different attendance rates, and a worked example you can copy into a spreadsheet before your next planning meeting.
Comparing prices? For current entry-plan prices, attendee limits and CRM integrations across 18 platforms, checked daily against each vendor’s own pages, see the Webinar Platform Index.
The five line items in a real webinar budget
Every webinar program budget reduces to five buckets. The percentages shift by company; the buckets never do.
- Platform. The license, priced per host, per room size or per attendee. Self-serve plans publish their prices; ON24 and Goldcast sell quoted annual contracts. The next section turns both into a cost per event, and our platform comparison covers the big names.
- Promotion. The most underestimated bucket. Email to your house list feels free but eats real ops hours. Paid ads on auction platforms have no list price: LinkedIn says your advertising costs “are based on the type of activity you’re paying for and the ad auction” (LinkedIn ads pricing). Budget it as a cap you choose, then measure what it bought.
- Speaker time. Prep, the dry run and delivery for every internal speaker. Ask each speaker for the hours instead of guessing, and cost them at loaded hourly rates. A guest expert’s honorarium, if there is one, is an invoice line: use the quote you get.
- Production. Slide design, landing page, moderation, dry run, replay editing. Freelancers and agencies send invoices; work your own team does goes in as hours times rate.
- Follow-up ops. Sequence building, lead routing, SDR hours working the attendee list. The bucket everyone forgets and the one that actually converts spend into pipeline. Our follow-up playbook covers the mechanics.
How to cost people’s time
Every bucket except the license includes people’s time, so cost that time the same way: hours times a loaded hourly rate. A loaded rate includes benefits, not just salary. For scale, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $46.89 per hour worked in June 2026, of which wages were $32.82 and benefits were “the remaining 30.0 percent” (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation). That is an all-industry average, not a rate for your marketing team, so ask finance for the loaded rate it uses for each role.
Then build the budget as a worksheet, one row per bucket:
| Line item | What to count | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | Annual license, plus any required base license, divided by webinars per year | The vendor’s pricing page or your contract |
| Promotion | Ad spend, plus hours spent on emails, social posts and list work | Your ad platform’s billing, plus hours times rate |
| Speaker time | Prep, dry run and delivery hours for each speaker, plus any honorarium | Hours times rate, plus the speaker’s quote |
| Production | Design, landing page, moderation, replay editing | Invoices, plus hours times rate for in-house work |
| Follow-up ops | Sequence building, lead routing, SDR calls to attendees | Hours times rate |
What the platform costs per event
Platform cost per event is the annual price divided by the number of webinars you run on it. At one webinar a month, a plan’s monthly price billed yearly is also its cost per event. Here are published prices for common entry plans as of October 2026, plus what buyers report paying for two quote-only platforms.
| Platform and plan | Audience included | Published price | Cost per event at 12 webinars a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| ClickMeeting Live | 50 attendees | $37/mo billed yearly | $37 |
| Demio Starter | 50 attendees, 1 host | $45/mo billed yearly | $45 |
| GoTo Webinar Reach | Up to 500 participants, 1 organizer | $59/mo billed yearly | $59 |
| Riverside Webinar | Up to 100 registrants | $79/mo billed yearly | $79 |
| Zoom Webinars | 500 attendees | $83.33/mo billed yearly, and Zoom Workplace Pro is required ($14.16 per user a month billed yearly) | $83.33, or $97.49 if you also need Workplace Pro |
| Livestorm Pro | 400 attendee credits a year | $3.00 per attendee | Depends on turnout: $3.00 for each attendee, live or replay |
| Goldcast | Quote only | Median contract $27,590 a year, according to Vendr (99 purchases) | About $2,299 |
| ON24 | Quote only | Median contract $39,350 a year, according to Vendr (96 purchases) | About $3,279 |
Prices are US dollar list prices, except the Goldcast and ON24 figures, which are what buyers in Vendr’s data paid. Vendr’s ranges are wide: $15,000 to $77,606 a year for Goldcast and $18,625 to $136,652 for ON24. If your company already pays for Microsoft 365, Microsoft lists hosting webinars in Teams as part of Business Basic, at $7.00 per user a month paid yearly.
Among the self-serve plans, the limits matter as much as the price: fixed room sizes run from 50 to 500 people, Demio Starter allows one host, and Riverside counts registrants rather than attendees. Our pricing guides for Zoom Webinars, Livestorm, Demio, Riverside and ClickMeeting cover the limits. An enterprise contract gets cheaper per event the more events you run on it: at 24 webinars a year, the Vendr medians come to half the per-event figures in the table.
The cost per lead math: three numbers, not one
“Webinar cost per lead” hides three different metrics, and mixing them up is how teams lie to themselves. Calculate all three, always from the fully loaded cost, labor included.
- Cost per registrant. Fully loaded cost ÷ registrations. The flattering number.
- Cost per live attendee. Fully loaded cost ÷ live attendees. The honest number, because attendance is where intent shows up.
- Cost per attendee, live plus replay. Fully loaded cost ÷ (live attendees + replay viewers who missed the live session). This is the number that makes webinars competitive with any other channel.
Count each person once. Someone who attends live and later watches the replay is one attendee, which is also how Livestorm counts credits: “If they attend live and later watch the replay of the same session, they are only counted once for that session.”
How attendance rate moves your CPL
Nothing moves cost per attendee like show-up rate. Not platform choice, not a cheaper designer. The published averages disagree, partly because each vendor measures its own platform its own way:
- Goldcast’s 2025 B2B Webinar Benchmark Report, covering 19,531 webinars across 418 B2B companies, puts the average overall attendance rate at 33%.
- Livestorm’s 2026 Webinar Benchmark Report, covering 33,786 sessions run on Livestorm in 2025, puts the 2025 show-up rate at 47.7%.
- ON24’s 2026 benchmarks report that “the average webinar conversion rate of registrations to attendees hit 60%” on its platform, where 43 percent of attendees watched on demand.
So use your own rate. To see what it does, hold an example program at $10,000 fully loaded and 400 registrations, and change only the attendance rate:
| Attendance rate | Live attendees | Cost per live attendee | Cost per attendee, live plus replay* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20% | 80 | $125.00 | $100.00 |
| 30% | 120 | $83.33 | $66.67 |
| 40% | 160 | $62.50 | $50.00 |
| 50% | 200 | $50.00 | $40.00 |
*Example assumption: replay adds one new viewer for every four live attendees. Published data points both ways. ON24 reports that 43 percent of its attendees watched on demand, while Livestorm’s report counts average on-demand views of 3.97 for a gated replay and 14.60 for a public one, against an average of 83 live attendees. Use your own platform’s replay report.
At the same spend, doubling attendance halves your cost per attendee, which is why I think a four-email reminder sequence is the highest-ROI hour in the whole program. For where your own rates should sit, check our conversion rate benchmarks.
A worked example with round numbers
This is a made-up program with round inputs, not a real event and not a benchmark. Swap in your own numbers.
| Line item | Example input | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | A $1,200-a-year license used for 12 webinars | $100 |
| Paid promotion | A capped ad budget | $2,000 |
| Outside production | Freelance slide design and replay editing | $900 |
| People’s time | 70 hours at a $100 loaded hourly rate: 10 for the speaker, 30 for marketing and production, 30 for follow-up | $7,000 |
| Fully loaded | $10,000 |
Now run the math. If 400 people register, each registration costs $25. If 40% attend live, that’s 160 attendees at $62.50 each. If the replay adds 40 people who missed the live session, 200 attendees cost $50 each. If follow-up produces 20 qualified sales conversations, each one costs $500. Compare that with what your paid channels charge for a sales conversation with a named account.
Notice where the money went: in this example, people’s time is $7,000 of the $10,000 and the license is $100. Those shares come from the made-up inputs, not from any benchmark. Fill in your own worksheet and see which line is biggest before you spend time negotiating the license.
Where to cut, and where cutting backfires
Cut safely: an enterprise platform contract if your audiences fit a self-serve plan (GoTo Webinar Reach and Zoom Webinars’ 500-attendee tier both cover 500 people), custom slide design (a clean template beats bespoke decks nobody remembers), and paid promotion to cold audiences before your topic is proven with the house list. When you do pay for promotion, spend where registrations happen: Livestorm’s report found that 49.6% of registrations come in the final week and only 16.4% three or more weeks out.
Never cut: the reminder sequence, the dry run, or follow-up ops. Skipping reminders costs you attendance, and attendance moves every number in the table above. In Livestorm’s report, teams with show-up rates above 60% send personalized reminders three days before, the day before and the day of the event. Skipping the dry run risks the whole spend to save a few hours. And an unworked attendee list turns the entire budget into brand advertising.
Rather hand off the production work? DemandStage plans, promotes, produces and follows up on B2B webinar programs end to end.
Judge payback over your sales cycle
For ICP-aligned topics, webinar spend pays back on the timeline of your B2B sales cycle, not the week after the event. Budget webinars as a program with quarterly reviews, not as single events judged the following Monday, and track pipeline from attendees for at least one full sales cycle before you judge a topic.
That only works if attendee data reaches your CRM. Livestorm’s report says only 6 to 8% of its customers use native CRM integrations to sync webinar data to their pipeline, so check that connection before the first event. If your CFO wants the full pipeline math, that model lives in our webinar ROI and pipeline guide.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a webinar cost to run?
As of October 2026, platform licenses run from $37 a month billed yearly (ClickMeeting, 50 attendees) to $83.33 for Zoom Webinars at 500 attendees (plus Zoom Workplace Pro), and Vendr puts median Goldcast and ON24 contracts at $27,590 and $39,350 a year. The rest is promotion, people’s time at your loaded hourly rate, outside production and follow-up, which depend on your team. Total them with the worksheet above.
What is a good cost per lead for a webinar?
The benchmark reports cited here measure attendance, not cost per lead, so build your own baseline. Calculate it per registrant and per attendee (live plus replay), then judge it against what a comparable sales conversation costs from your paid channels, not against ebook-download CPLs.
How do you calculate webinar cost per lead?
Divide the fully loaded event cost, including labor hours at a loaded rate and not just invoices, by registrants, by live attendees, and by attendees including replay, and report all three. Teams that only report cost per registrant are grading themselves on the easiest curve.
How much should I budget for LinkedIn ads to promote a webinar?
LinkedIn’s pricing page doesn’t publish an average cost; it prices ads through an auction, and what you’re charged for depends on your campaign objective. Pick a lifetime budget as your cap, since LinkedIn says “your total spend will never exceed the lifetime budget” (LinkedIn help). After the event, divide spend by the registrations the campaign produced to get your own paid cost per registrant.
Are webinars cheaper than paid ads for B2B lead generation?
It depends which number you compare. Per raw lead, a webinar carries hours of people’s time that a form-fill ad doesn’t, so it can look expensive. Per qualified conversation, attendees have already spent real time with you: Livestorm’s report puts the average viewer’s stay at 26 minutes, and ON24 reports average engagement of 49 minutes. Compare cost per qualified conversation from each channel on your own data.
Budget modeling like this is lesson-one material from our courses. See what’s coming, or get the free lessons by email as they ship.
Last checked: October 2026. Prices and plans change; check the vendor’s page before you buy.