How Much Do Webinars Typically Cost to Run? Real Numbers for 2026

The short version: a basic webinar costs somewhere between £0 and £800 in tools and software, but a webinar that fills seats and produces leads usually costs £1,500 to £5,000 once you count promotion and staff time. The platform is the cheap part. The expensive part is getting people to turn up, and almost nobody budgets for that.

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Why “how much does a webinar cost” is the wrong first question

I get asked this a lot by small business owners who’ve decided webinars are their next big lead generation play. They want a single number. I understand why, budgets need lines on a spreadsheet, but the honest answer is that the software is rarely where the money goes.

I ran a webinar in early 2023 for a client launching a B2B service. We spent £340 on the platform (Livestorm, annual plan), £0 on the landing page because we built it in our existing CRM, and roughly £1,200 on LinkedIn ads to drive registrations. We got 480 sign-ups. On the day, 61 people showed up. That’s a 13% attendance rate, which is about average, most B2B webinars land between 35% and 45% show-up rate when you’ve done reminder emails, and ours fell short because we skipped the day-of reminder text and relied only on email. That one mistake, not the software, cost us maybe 40 to 60 attendees. So the £340 platform fee was almost irrelevant. The £1,200 in ad spend and the missing reminder sequence decided whether the webinar worked.

That’s the pattern I see over and over. People obsess over which tool to buy and then wonder why nobody comes.

Platform costs: the part everyone asks about first

Here’s what the main webinar tools cost in 2026, based on current published pricing:

• Zoom Webinars: from around £69 a month for 500 attendees, rising to £299+ a month for larger capacity tiers (1,000 to 3,000 attendees). Zoom Meetings alone (fine for very small webinars) is £11.99 to £15.99 a month per host.
• GoToWebinar: roughly £45 to £350+ a month depending on audience size, with the entry Lite plan capped at 250 attendees.
• Livestorm: free for up to 20 minutes and 30 attendees, then £79 to £259 a month for the Premium and Enterprise tiers.
• Demio: around £39 to £131 a month, popular with smaller businesses because the interface is simpler to set up.
• WebinarJam: sold as an annual package, roughly £399 to £799 a year rather than monthly, aimed at marketers running automated evergreen webinars.
• StreamYard or Restream (for a more produced, multi-camera feel): £20 to £80 a month.

If you’re just starting out and want to test whether webinars work for your business at all, you don’t need to spend a penny. Zoom’s free tier or a basic Google Meet call, screen-shared and recorded, will do the job for your first one or two events. I’ve said this before when I wrote about hosting a webinar with tools you probably already have, and I still stand by it. Buy the fancier platform once you know you’ll run these regularly, not before.

What a full budget looks like

Break the real cost of a webinar into five buckets, not one:

• Platform/software: £0 to £300 for a single event, depending on tier.
• Promotion: £0 (organic only) to £2,000+, this is where most of the real spend sits.
• Design and production: £50 to £600 for slides, graphics, a landing page, and possibly a short promo video.
• People’s time: often unpaid or absorbed into salary, but if you cost it out honestly at £25 to £60 an hour, a decently promoted webinar eats 20 to 40 hours across planning, writing, design, rehearsal, hosting, and follow-up.
• Follow-up: email sequences, a thank-you page, sales calls with attendees who showed intent. Often free if you already have the systems, but this is the step most businesses skip, and it’s the step that converts a webinar into revenue.

Put together, here’s roughly what different scales of webinar cost, all-in:

• DIY, list-only, no ad spend: £0 to £100. You email your existing list, use a free platform, and skip design. Fine for a first test.
• Small business, one-off promoted event: £300 to £900. Paid platform tier, a landing page, some organic social promotion, maybe £150 in boosted posts.
• Serious lead-gen webinar with paid promotion: £1,500 to £5,000. This is where most B2B companies running webinars as a genuine part of their video marketing strategy sit. LinkedIn ads for B2B registrations typically cost £30 to £90 per registrant in competitive industries, which adds up fast if you need 300+ sign-ups.
• Multi-speaker summit or high-production launch event: £8,000 to £40,000+. Multiple presenters, professional editing, paid influencer or affiliate promotion, sometimes a dedicated event manager.

The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. Most webinar cost breakdowns you’ll find online talk about software and ads and stop there. They don’t mention that the biggest single cost of a webinar, for most small businesses, is the opportunity cost of staff time spent building a one-hour event that a large chunk of registrants will never watch live and might never watch at all. I’ve seen small teams spend two full weeks preparing a “free” webinar, three people involved, none of it costed against the business, and then treat the £150 Facebook ad spend as the whole budget. It isn’t. If you paid those three people even minimum wage for those two weeks, the real cost of that “free” webinar was closer to £3,000. Nobody wants to write that number down because it makes the ROI conversation harder, but pretending staff time is free is how businesses end up running the same underperforming webinar format for two years without noticing it never paid for itself. If you’re going to run webinars, cost your own time into it from day one. It changes how ruthless you are about which webinars are worth doing.

Where the money is worth spending

If your budget is tight and you can only spend in one place beyond the free platform tier, spend on promotion and follow-up, not production polish. A webinar with slightly wonky slides and 80 engaged attendees who get a proper follow-up sequence will outperform a beautifully produced webinar with 15 attendees and no follow-up, every single time. Concretely, that means:

• Spend on a landing page that converts (a simple one built in your existing CRM or a £15/month tool is enough).
• Spend on a three-email reminder sequence (one week before, one day before, one hour before) rather than a single “you’re registered” confirmation.
• Spend on 30 minutes of someone’s time to send a personal LinkedIn message to your 20 highest-value registrants, not just a mass email.
• Spend on a follow-up sequence for no-shows, since roughly 60% of your registrants won’t turn up live and most businesses simply write them off instead of sending the recording with a next step.

Real example: two webinars, same budget, very different results

To make this less theoretical, here’s a comparison from two webinars I’ve been closely involved with, both run on roughly the same £1,000 total budget. Webinar one: a software company launch. £250 on Demio, £600 on Facebook ads, £150 on a designer for slides. No reminder texts, one confirmation email, no no-show follow-up. Result: 340 registrants, 41 live attendees, 2 sales calls booked. Webinar two, run about four months later by the same team, having learned from the first: £250 on the same platform, £400 on ads (deliberately reduced), £100 on design, and the remaining £250 spent on a virtual assistant to build a proper five-email sequence covering pre-event reminders and post-event follow-up for both attendees and no-shows. Result: 210 registrants, 88 live attendees, 11 sales calls booked. Same total spend, roughly. Fewer registrants the second time, more than double the attendance, and more than five times the sales calls. The lesson is that shifting money from ad spend into the boring follow-up mechanics is usually the highest-return move you can make, and it’s the one thing most cost guides never mention because it’s not a line item with a clean price tag next to it.

Should you hire someone to run this instead of doing it yourself?

If webinars are going to be a regular part of how you generate leads, at some point the maths tips toward getting help rather than continuing to DIY it. A freelance webinar producer or marketing consultant in the UK typically charges £400 to £1,500 per event depending on how much they handle, from tech setup through to the follow-up sequence. That sounds like a lot next to a £69 software subscription, but if it turns a 13% show-up rate into a 45% one, it pays for itself in a single event. If you’re weighing that decision, it’s worth reading a proper breakdown of what an AI consultant typically costs before you commit, since a lot of the follow-up automation, personalised email sequences, and no-show recovery I’ve described above can now be built once and run largely on autopilot with the right AI setup, which changes the long-term cost picture considerably.

What to budget if you’re planning your first one

Here’s a simple step-by-step for a first webinar with a modest budget of around £500:

• Step 1: Pick a free or entry-tier platform (Zoom, Livestorm free, or Demio’s cheapest paid tier). Budget: £0 to £39.
• Step 2: Build a one-page registration form, either in your existing website builder or a simple landing page tool. Budget: £0 to £30/month.
• Step 3: Design 15 to 20 slides yourself using a template, or pay a freelancer on a platform like PeoplePerHour for a couple of hours’ work. Budget: £0 to £120.
• Step 4: Write a three-email reminder sequence and a two-email follow-up sequence (one for attendees, one for no-shows) before you promote anything, not after. Budget: your time, or £100 to £200 if outsourced.
• Step 5: Put £150 to £300 behind a small, targeted ad campaign to your ideal audience rather than boosting to everyone. Budget: £150 to £300.
• Step 6: Run the webinar, then follow up within 24 hours, not a week later, while intent is still warm.

That whole plan sits comfortably under £500 and covers every bucket that matters, not just the software.

Where webinars fit into a bigger content plan

One more thing worth saying: webinars work best as one piece of a wider approach rather than a standalone tactic you run once and abandon when the first one underperforms. If you’re building this out, it’s worth reading how B2B webinars fit into a client-winning strategy and, if you’re expanding into video more broadly, understanding who typically owns this work inside a marketing team so you know whether you need a dedicated hire or can keep running it as a shared responsibility.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the cheapest way to run a webinar?

Use Zoom’s free tier or Google Meet, screen-share your slides, record it yourself, and promote only to your existing email list and social following. This costs £0 in software but still requires real time investment in preparing content and writing a follow-up email, which is the part people most often skip.

Is it worth paying for a webinar platform like Zoom Webinars or GoToWebinar?

It’s worth it once you’re running webinars regularly or need more than 100 attendees, better registration tracking, or automated reminder emails built into the platform. For a one-off event with under 50 expected attendees, a free tool is enough.

How much should I spend on ads to promote a webinar?

For B2B audiences on LinkedIn, expect to pay £30 to £90 per registrant depending on how niche your audience is, so a target of 200 registrants could mean £6,000 to £18,000 in ad spend at the high end, or far less if you rely more on Facebook, email, and organic outreach, where cost per registrant often drops to £5 to £15.

Why does my webinar have lots of registrants but low attendance?

This is almost always a reminder sequence problem, not a promotion problem. A single confirmation email typically produces a 20% to 30% show-up rate, while a proper sequence of three reminders, including one on the day of the event, usually pushes that to 40% or higher. Fix the reminders before you spend more on ads.