How does this compared to all other conf costs?
Very cool though, that they managed to pull it off.
Time-wise, I did Emacs-related things for 36 hours in Sept, 40 hours in Oct, and 52 hours in Nov. That included about an hour a week for Emacs News. To be fair, it's really more like hobby/fun time... :)
We've been experimenting with sending tokens of appreciation (evil plan: stickers/pins might get other people to talk to speakers about Emacs), but Corwin's treating that as a personal experiment and not including it in the conference budgeting.
And of course, there's a lot of stuff that isn't counted in monetary costs, like the time that speakers put into their talks or the servers that people have shared with us.
But yeah, it's surprising what you can do on a shoestring budget and with casual volunteers. Definitely worth considering if people have been thinking about running their own conference. :)