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Comment by moses1400 | Hacker News Reader

Double the price of last year.

there is a bright side to it - the 'sold out in a hour' situation last year was ridiculous. While i would have preferred a coding challenge to eliminate that problem, a price increase is another method of fixing it.

Yes, but it's a poor way to fix it. A high price just means that corporate people looking to get some free goodies will be more likely to attend than hackers who have to pay the $900 out of their own pockets.

This will be the first time I won't even bother to register. Too much money.

Another way would have been to announce that they won't be giving away any hardware, that would have kept away the "it pays for it self and I get some cool goodies" crowd away so real developers could go.

The last two years, Google has said "There are no plans for giveaways." And of course, attendees actually got about $1000 worth in stuff in 2010 (Droid phone, EVO, Google TV), and $1200 worth in freebies in 2011 (Galaxy Tab 10.1, Chromebook, Verizon hotspot).

They could say there are no giveaways, but nobody's going to listen to the boy who cried wolf anymore.

I do not remember any such announcements.

They should charge the $900 and not give away any hardware without announcing whether or not they're going to. They'll be able to have $400 tickets next year without selling out as fast.

Great point. A coding challenge would stop the attendees who just plan to get the free hardware and flip it for a quick profit.

It is, but the increased price might be because there is an extra day this year.

Isn't that atypical of incremental pricing? One would expect the marginal cost of the third day to be lower, if anything.

We organise a smaller (a lot smaller!) conference¹ in Helsinki, Finland and I can tell you that a surprising number of things increase in cost linearly as you add more days.

Of course adding one more day to a two day conference doesn't double your costs, but I'd image that Google is taking into account inflation as well as just trying to increase their profit margin (though taking into account the amount of hardware they give out they give out to attendees does indicate that they're also trying to limit the audience to actual developers).

¹ http://2012.frozenrails.eu/

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