Is it worth it? probably. but maybe not.
The true cost of a full time office worker employee once all taxes and benefits are factored in are usually going to be a lot higher than that. This would make the service a lot more worth it.
OTOH if that employee is underutilized, their time is effectively free, so the only thing you would be paying for is (hopefully) quality and consistency.
There's a one time cost of learning all that stuff, and then each year you just reuse those same templates and skills with a new logo/graphics from your design guy.
If this is something your team/volunteer group/etc. rarely does, then it's probably worth just paying conference badges. It's a trade-off.
If it's a non-profit thing, consider open souring the process and CC licensing the designs to help others doing the same thing.
It takes me anywhere between 5–15 minutes to set things up, and my biggest annoyance throughout the process is dealing with CSV character encodings.
I think the main value the service provides is that it provides "guaranteed" next-day delivery. My print shop gives me a fair amount of crap for not sending my badges to print a few days in advance.
On the other hand, it's so much less work for organisers to print blank white boxes, and let attendees fill in their own preferred names at check-in.
Our (enterprise) business customers dont care about price much, they care about things going smoothly for an event which has a ton of moving parts.
We serve a similar demographic.
[1] For example: https://www.marcopromos.com/product/3-4-cotton-no-flip-lanya...
I guess it's the same kind of magic that makes the USB port always be the wrong orientation, then you flip it and it's wrong again, and it's only right after you flip it twice.
If I'm there on a founder badge, for example, it's difficult to chat up investors because they're wary of hearing the 400th pitch from a random startup guy when I really just want to talk and make a connection.
This may be more annoying for me than most because I'm often at conferences as someone's guest, so the badge type rarely matches with my goals for attending.
That's the easy version. The overkill version uses Kafka, BigQuery and AWS SNS. (/s)
The intersection between the set of business opportunities that can work bootstrapped and set of business opportunities that work when strongly funded might be much smaller than one would naively assume.
Would you care to share how you identified the opportunity and estimated potential revenue?