From the call for abstracts to the screen outside the door.
Rostrum runs the scientific program of a professional conference — the submissions, the peer review, the selection, the slide decks, the schedule, and the signage in the hallway. One record the whole way through, so nothing is retyped and nothing is lost in a hand-off.
No audiovisual contract to sell you. No registration system to bundle. The price is on this site, and so is the manual.
No demo required. No form. No sales call.
The span
Conferences don't break in the software. They break between it.
A society's program passes through six stages between the call opening and the doors opening. Most vendors own one or two of them, so the rest is bridged by spreadsheets, re-keyed data and email. Every break is a place where a title changes in one system and not the other — and the printed sign is the last to know.
How it usually goes
With Rostrum
An accepted abstract becomes a presentation without being retyped. Move that presentation on the schedule and the room sign, the delegate app and the speaker's own deadline all follow it.
From the call to the room
One record, from the first abstract to the sign outside the door.
A submission arrives through the call, is assigned to reviewers, scored, accepted, converted into a presentation, placed in a session and shown on the sign outside the room — and it is the same record the whole way. Nothing is re-keyed between vendors, because there are no vendors between the steps.
That is the span. It is also why the abstract call is the natural place to start: a society that begins its cycle on Rostrum never hands the program off to anyone.
Illustration: one abstract’s path through a cycle.
- SubmittedCall for abstracts · 14 Sep
- Under review2 of 3 reviews in · blind
- AcceptedOral presentation · notified 2 Nov
- On the programImaging II · Tue 10:40 · Hall 2C
- On the signHall 2C · now showing
Upload your slides — Tuesday 09:15, Hall 2C
Your link, no password. Versions kept; the room gets the latest.
Your Rostrum sign-in code: 482 913
Valid for ten minutes. Your queue is waiting.
Two reviews by Friday · slides by 12 Nov
One list per person, nothing else to learn.
Nobody has to make an account
Speakers, reviewers, authors and attendees participate without a password.
Late speaker content has one cause above all others: a login nobody remembers. So Rostrum does not ask for one. Speakers upload through a personal link. Reviewers and attendees sign in with a code sent to their email. Poster authors and moderators use tokenized links. Each person sees a short list of what they owe and by when — and nothing else.
The result is that most of the people who touch a conference never see a sign-in screen, and the program committee stops chasing passwords.
Illustration: the three ways people get in.
The last mile
The sign outside the room knows what the committee decided this morning.
Beacon drives the screens in your building from the same program data as everything else. Put a browser on a display, pair it once, and it shows what is in that room now and what is next. Change the schedule at ten past nine and the door updates itself — no re-export, no reprint, nobody walking the corridor with tape.
Room signs, session boards, a welcome screen, wayfinding, poster galleries and full-screen emergency announcements are all the same module.
Illustration of a room-sign display. Times shown are the venue's own timezone.
Now
Opening plenary: where the field goes next
PlenaryNext
Modules
Twelve modules. Switch on the ones this event needs.
One is always on. The other eleven are per-event, so the small spring workshop and the 2,000-abstract annual congress run on the same platform without the workshop paying for machinery it will never open. Most events use three or four.
Building and scheduling the program itself is not a module — the platform, the agenda grid, spreadsheet import, communications, speakers, tracks and venues are always there. The full catalog lists every setting each module carries and the value it defaults to.
AI, where it helps
Assistance that proposes — never acts alone
AI in Rostrum is a platform capability, not a bolt-on chatbot. It shows up where organizer work is genuinely tedious, drafts something concrete, and shows you the whole proposal before anything is created.
Point it at your website
Give guided setup your event's site and it pre-fills the name, dates, venue and topics it finds — every field confirmed by you, never silently applied.
Describe your program, review a draft
Tell the Program builder what you want — five rooms, an opening keynote, lunch at noon, done by 11 on the last day. It asks what it needs to know, then proposes a complete schedule you can revise in plain language before creating it. It can even start from last year's program.
Sessions from a pile of talks
Hand it your unplaced presentations and it groups them by topic into named session proposals — reading titles and abstracts only, never author identities — for you to apply, adjust or ignore.
Enabled per organization, with a monthly usage budget. Nothing is delegate-facing, and nothing is written without your review — and when AI is off, the platform simply works as it always did.
The unglamorous part
Somebody has to chase the eleven people who haven't uploaded.
It is the most reliably painful job in conference operations, and across the vendors we researched it is largely still done by a person with a spreadsheet at eleven at night. Every platform sends email. Very few chase the people who have done nothing at all.
You set the schedule, not the vendor
Reminders go out on the intervals you choose before each deadline — not on a cadence hard-coded by someone who has never run your meeting.
Deadlines are judged in the venue's timezone
A midnight deadline in Vienna is midnight in Vienna, wherever the speaker or the server happens to be.
One reminder per person per day
Someone presenting in three sessions gets one email, not three. Nagging that feels like spam gets filtered, and then it chases nobody.
It runs whether or not anyone opens the portal
The sweep is automatic and hourly. Your staff find out who is outstanding by looking, not by remembering to check.
of the twenty-three vendors we researched document no way to chase people who have submitted nothing. Where reminders are documented, they are usually a manual send.
other vendors document all three of a customer-set reminder schedule, evaluation in the event venue’s timezone, and deduplication to one message per person per day.
Competitive research, August 2026 — twenty-four vendors assessed against their own published documentation. Not documented is not the same as not offered. The method is in our buyer’s guides.
Pricing
Nine numbers. Published, because you should be able to plan a budget without booking a demo.
Of the twenty-four vendors we looked at, nine publish a price. We think that is the wrong way round, so here is ours. Annual, per organization, in US dollars.
| Bundle | Small up to 200 | Mid 201–750 | Large 751–2,000 | Over 2,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Program The platform, agenda and schedule building, spreadsheet import, speaker file collection with deadlines, content review, communications. | $3,600 | $8,400 | $15,000 | Let's talk |
| Congress Program, plus Call for Abstracts in full, Posters, and Papers on Demand. | $6,000 | $13,200 | $24,000 | Let's talk |
| Congress + Onsite Everything, plus the Attendee App, Beacon signage, Session Feedback, Open Mic, and the public abstract, poster, and paper galleries. | $8,400 | $18,000 | $32,000 | Let's talk |
What the band counts
Everything your program committee handles in a year: every abstract that arrives — including the ones you reject — every session proposal, counted once however many talks it holds, and anything you add or import directly.
It does not count delegates, reviewers, committee members or staff seats, emails sent, files stored, screens deployed, or rooms used. And converting an accepted abstract into a presentation is never a second charge — it was already counted when it arrived.
No implementation fee, on any tier. Crossing a band during your year is flagged, never blocked, and settled at renewal — nobody gets cut off in the middle of their meeting.
Running conferences for other people? There is an agency tier with a cross-client console, white-labeling and one invoice. Ask us.
Independence
We don’t sell audiovisual production, onsite staffing, or registration. We never will.
That isn’t a promise about how we’ll behave. It’s a description of what the product is.
Rostrum is the program layer and nothing else, which means it can never become the reason you have to keep a supplier you’d otherwise replace — not an AV company, not a production crew, not a registration platform.
Your AV partner is your business. Your registration system is your business. If either one changes next year, the program doesn’t move and the price doesn’t move. Nothing here is quoted alongside a service you didn’t ask for, so the software price is a software price — the number on the table above is the whole number, and it is comparable with anyone else’s.
Rostrum reads and writes standard formats, and your program data leaves in a spreadsheet the same way it can arrive in one.
Where things stand
Built, released, and in production since August 2026.
Rostrum went to production in August 2026 after twelve months of building. It is a complete platform, not a prototype: eighty-seven data models, four hundred and ninety-three API endpoints, five interface languages, permissions enforced at six levels of scope, and 8,884 automated tests that gate every release.
What it does not have yet is customers. We would rather say so than imply otherwise with a wall of logos. If you are weighing us against an incumbent, that is a real risk and it should be priced into your decision. We take it seriously enough that there's a program built around it — ask, and we'll send you the terms.
Built by someone who has run the room.
Jason Brenna spent eighteen years behind the scenes of scientific meetings — in the speaker ready room and on the program committee’s timeline — sixteen of them building the software that collected the files and ran the room. Every year the same societies stitched that one piece together with an abstract system, a scheduling spreadsheet, a signage vendor and an event app, and every year the failures happened in the seams. Rostrum is the thing the seams were asking for.
Documentation
Read the manual before you talk to us.
Both documents are public and complete. If you are shortlisting vendors, the second one is the useful one: every setting in the platform with the value it defaults to, including the handful whose labels are misleading and the places where one module quietly depends on another.