An operating system for conferences & expos
Run the whole show.
Registration, commerce, your program, and the front desk on one platform, from the first signup to the badge scan at the door.
The idea
Most conference software makes you run your event its way. We found that a little presumptuous.
Exp/OS runs the whole of a conference or expo. The conference is the world, and inside it live your events (sessions, panels, talks, shows) alongside your exhibitors, your sponsors, your ticket tiers, your staff, and every attendee, speaker, and member of the press. One platform holds all of it, from the first signup to the last badge printed.
You define the pieces: your own badges and tiers, your own products and options, your own roles, your own theme. The platform bends to fit, instead of asking your event to bend to it. Underneath it's a real platform, .NET running in our own cloud, from the company that makes Phosis. It takes real money, survives real load, and keeps one clean record of everything.
Why we built it
We went shopping for this and came home empty-handed.
The platforms that could run a conference start to finish were priced like they were doing us a favor, and still didn't do half of what we needed. The affordable ones did a tenth of it. So we built the platform we wanted to buy: everything a conference actually requires, none of the enterprise theater, and a price that isn't an act of aggression.
At a glance
Define anything.
Configurable ticket and exhibitor tiers; your own badges, products, options, roles, sponsors, and theme. The platform fits the event, not the reverse.
Sell all of it.
Tickets, booths, merch, meals, add-ons, paid by card, digital wallet, or bank. Comps, single-use codes, and refunds handled.
Run the front door.
Check-in, badge printing via ZPL, and lead capture, on a recommended hardware setup with a how-to to match, built to keep working even when the venue Wi-Fi doesn't.
Put it on your site.
An API and drop-in widgets push your exhibitors, sponsors, tiers, and schedule onto your public site, in markup you control.
Already in production.
Running a real expo right now, with real registrants and real money. Not a slide in a deck.
How it works
Four stages, from “I'm interested” to “I'm in the door.”
Plain sign-ups go in. A fully managed conference, paid, programmed, and ready at the door, comes out. The complexity stays under the hood, where it belongs.
Register
Anyone signs up — attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, press, speakers and performers — claiming the badges and tiers you define, against the caps you set.
Pay
Checkout for tickets, booths, and products with options (a shirt that needs a size, a dinner that needs a meal choice), plus add-ons, comps, and refunds.
Program
Build the program of sessions, panels, talks, and shows, each with its own venue, capacity, waitlist, and lineup, on a schedule your badgeholders actually carry around.
Run the day
Check people in, print badges, and capture leads, online or off. Assign booths on a visual floor map and watch check-ins light it up as the day fills.
The honest part
Exp/OS isn't five years old with a thousand customers. It's brand new, and it's being forged on a real event with real stakes (every booth, badge, and dollar of an actual expo) before we open it to anyone else. You won't be buying a promise. You'll be getting the platform that already survived the thing it was built for.
What's built in
The unglamorous, mission-critical things, already handled.
Most platforms sell these back to you a module at a time. In Exp/OS they come standard, because no conference should ship without them.
Tiers that bend to you.
Ticket and exhibitor tiers are yours to shape end to end: pricing, limits, what's included. Each exhibitor tier hands out however many comp badges you decide, and sponsors fold in the same way.
Secure payments, done properly.
Card, wallet, and bank payments via Stripe; comps and single-use codes; refunds; and real gross-and-net revenue you can reconcile, with a full payment history per person, exportable.
Signed, sealed.
E-signed exhibitor and sponsor contracts, captured and stored against the booth they belong to, so the paperwork lives where the money does.
Awards & voting.
Stand up an award and decide who votes: attendees only, the whole public, or no one. Open or close the ballot on the dates you set.
Know what filled the room.
Every signup carries its source. UTM tracking shows which campaign, email, or channel actually drove badges, so you know what earned its keep instead of guessing.
Comms in one place.
Operational and marketing email, in-app notifications, and audiences segmented by who someone is, with opt-in, unsubscribe, and suppression handled to the letter of the law.
Reports for everyone who asks.
Who paid, who owes, badge and product counts, meal choices, booth assignments, and scanned-lead lists: every table out the door as CSV or Excel.
Built to stay up.
.NET in our own cloud, zero-downtime deploys across redundant servers, daily backups, and an audit trail of who changed what, when.
Room blocks
Fill the block without babysitting it.
Sell hotel rooms right alongside badges, across one property or a dozen, and Exp/OS keeps the inventory honest so you don't have to.
One block, many hotels.
Each property gets its own rooms, rates, and caps, all sold from the same checkout.
Sold out, switched off.
Hit a cap and those rooms disable themselves, so no one books a room that isn't there.
Booking the block pays off.
Automatic discounts or comps on products and add-ons for anyone staying in the block, so a filled room fills the rest of the cart too.
The clever part
The pickup report reads itself. Drop in the hotel's pickup CSV and Exp/OS parses it, matches it against your block, and flags sold-out on its own. The one report nobody wants to reconcile by hand, reconciled.
Put it on your site
Your data, on your public site, in markup you control.
Everything Exp/OS knows can flow to your public-facing site. A clean API serves your exhibitor and sponsor lists and their full profiles (logo, bios, links, photo galleries), plus your badge tiers, exhibitor tiers, and schedule.
And drop-in widgets render all of it as real HTML, for every list and tier you publish, so you style it to match your site down to the pixel, or take the sane defaults and ship. It's the same conviction behind Phosis, our website platform: your markup, your control. Pairs beautifully with a Phosis site, and works with whatever site you've already got.
Anywhere you run it
A back office on your desk. The whole floor in every pocket.
Exp/OS is built for both screens, from the same data. Organizers work the dashboard, the reports, and the approvals on desktop. On the floor it's a mobile site, with no app to install, no app store, just a URL. Staff check people in, exhibitors scan and save leads, and badgeholders carry their badge, their schedule, and their notes wherever they wander. Two front doors, one platform, nothing to reconcile after.
Optional add-on
Want hands on the ground? Mattermind staff can be on-site with you, standing up the check-in islands, working the front desk, and keeping the door moving. You run the show. We can help you work it.
In production
It isn't a demo. It's already running an expo.
Exp/OS was built to run NAESE, the North American Electronic Sound Expo, our sibling company's three-day celebration of electronic sound and the people who make it, coming to Cleveland in 2027. Every booth sold, every badge issued, and every dollar taken for NAESE runs through Exp/OS today, in production, with real registrants, real exhibitors, and real money.
That's the whole point of launching second. We're hardening the platform on an event we own, where the stakes are real and the bugs are ours to feel, before we hand it to yours. The expo is the proof. You get the platform that endured it.
Want to see it standing up in the wild? It's right over there → naese.co
Expo floor opens in
Friday, April 9, 2027 · 12:00 PM ET · Cleveland
The people who live on it get a little attached.
“With 15+ years of experience as an attendee, vendor, and performer, I've used a lot of event platforms. Exp/OS blows them all out of the water. From managing registrations and schedules to downloading invoices for my accounting, everything just works.” Read moreRead less
“The wildest thing about Exp/OS is how little I think about it – and that's because it provides a great-looking, stable interface filled with the functions my attendees, staff, and I need, allowing me to spend my time with my data instead of squashing bugs.” Read moreRead less
Want in?
If you run conferences or expos and you'd build yours on this, join the waitlist, and you'll be among the first through the door when Exp/OS opens after NAESE, to everyone from solo organizers to full production companies, each standing their own event up. If you'd rather back it or partner on it, we're talking with a small number of people about what's next, so reach out directly.
Reach us directly