The catch question
When software says free, organizers reach for the catch, and they are right to. Free tiers in event software tend to mean a car cap that lands right before your show gets good, a feature gate in front of the one thing you needed, or a trial clock that runs out the week before gates open.
Ours takes one paragraph, which is sort of the point.
The free tier, itemized
Everything. Online registration with a recorded liability waiver. Walk-up kiosk registration at the gate. Printable windshield cards with per-car QR codes. On-site spectator voting with duplicate protection. Judged scoring with scoresheets you define. Sponsor tiers, a donation tip jar, and automatic tallies for category winners, Best of Show, and People’s Choice. No car limit, no entry limit, no show limit, no trial clock.
Entry fees, sponsor payments, and donations settle to your own payment account. We are never the merchant of record and we never hold your money. That part is identical on free and paid shows, and it is not a growth tactic. It is how we think event money should work.
The trade
A free show runs on a carshowhq.com web address, and its page carries a small card that says the show runs on Car Show HQ.
That is the entire trade.
We will name the self-interest, since a trade you cannot see the other side of is not much of a trade: free shows are how we reach the next volunteer crew without an ad budget. You get the whole product. We get a line of credit with the kind of person who reads car show software blogs. (Hi.)
The parts people assume are paid, and are not
Two things shipped recently that free shows keep in full. Every show page now stays up permanently after the show: once you finalize, it carries a Winners section with each winning car, the owner’s name, and the count or points behind the win, plus a photo gallery you can fill after the fact. And every show page ships with search and social basics built in, meaning clean canonical addresses that redirect year over year instead of breaking, social preview cards so a pasted link unfurls with your flyer, and event structured data for search engines.
A club paying an agency for a one-page show site would get billed real money for that list. On Car Show HQ it is the default, on the free tier, with the promo card as the whole price.
The fundraising tools are the other place people go hunting for the catch, so to be explicit about those too: the donation tip jar, the sponsor tiers with the public sponsor page, and the paid car-number picks are all part of the free tier, and every dollar they bring in settles to your payment account like everything else.
White-label, and what it costs
Some clubs want the show fully under their own name: their domain, their branding, no promo card. That is the one thing we charge for, priced by how many cars register:
| Show size | White-label price |
|---|---|
| Up to 75 cars | $39 per show |
| 76 to 200 cars | $79 per show |
| 201 or more cars | $149 per show |
| Annual pass, unlimited shows | $199 a year |
Two details matter more than the numbers. You pay when a show goes live, not while you build it, so you can set the whole thing up, show your board, and commit later. And there is no overage charge: if you buy the Small show pass and ninety cars turn up, the extra cars register fine and you keep your results. You pay for the pass you picked. Predictable beats precise.
Registered 501(c)(3) organizations can go white-label free or at a reduced rate. If you are raising money for a cause, say so on the consultation page and we will set you up.
The math worth doing
Set up your show for free. Open registration, put up a couple of sponsor tiers, turn on the tip jar, run voting, hand out awards. If the built-in fundraising brings in more than a white-label fee would cost, upgrading pays for itself out of new money instead of the club budget. And if free keeps working for you, keep running free. The pricing page has the full fine print, and the comparison page puts these numbers next to what the other platforms charge, sourced from their own public sites.
We mean the free tier as a real tier, not a funnel. The fastest way to test that claim is to build a show on it and try to hit a wall.
