Accessible by Design
Affordability isn’t a discount we’re offering. It’s one of the three things Biggest Little Dreamin’ is actually built on, alongside Community First and Built to Last, and it’s the one we want to explain, not just apply.
Conference budgets have gotten tighter across the board. Fewer companies are sending employees to conferences than they used to. More Trailblazers are paying their own way, out of pocket, and some are between jobs right now. We’ve heard this directly, not as an abstract trend, from enough people in this community that it was clear something had to change. None of it is a reason someone should be shut out of a community they’re part of. A conference that only works for people whose employer covers the cost isn’t the kind of community-first conference we set out to build.
We’re straightforward about what this actually costs us: the Community Rate doesn’t cover the full cost per person to run the conference. We’re doing it anyway. This is an experiment, not a guaranteed formula, and we say that honestly rather than pretending it’s a fully solved system. Between people who choose to give a little more through the Community Fund and the sponsors who support the event, the gap gets covered, and more Trailblazers get to be in the room. We’d rather try that than go back to a price that quietly excludes people. Details on how that actually works are on How Pricing Works.
Every ticket is $99, the Community Rate, the same price for every Trailblazer. No tiers, no early pricing games deciding who gets in first or cheapest. Our hotel block runs $69 a night on weekdays and $99 a night on weekends, all in, before taxes, directly across the street from the venue. A free shuttle runs from the airport, so no rental car is needed, and no one has to budget for a rideshare on top of the ticket and the room. What’s included in the $99 isn’t stripped down to match the price either: every session, every track, no upsells, evening events built around actually talking to people, and access to the sponsor expo. None of this is an accident or an afterthought bolted onto the conference after the fact. It’s built into the choices we made from the start: the city, the venue, the hotel block, the price.
The location isn’t incidental to any of this, it’s part of how it actually works. Reno has a compact, walkable downtown where the hotel block, the venue, and the airport shuttle all sit within minutes of each other. That layout is what makes it possible to skip a rental car entirely and keep costs down without cutting anything from the experience. A sprawling host city with an inconvenient venue would have worked against everything this page is about, no matter what the ticket price said.
Biggest Little Dreamin’ carries forward the spirit of Tahoe Dreamin’, a conference that ran for nearly a decade before ending in 2025 when rising venue costs made it unsustainable to continue there. Biggest Little Dreamin’ is a fresh start, not that same event moved to a new city. Reno gives us a venue and a cost structure that can actually last: affordability that’s structural, not a temporary promotion.
If cost, or an employer who won’t approve travel this year, or being between jobs right now is the thing standing between you and registering, that’s exactly the problem the Community Rate exists to solve. Nobody sits out over money. If $99 is still genuinely out of reach, reach out directly at info@biggestlittledreamin.com and talk to us before assuming there’s no way to make it work.
Sponsors are part of how this works too. When cost isn’t the reason a Trailblazer stays home, more of them show up, and that’s exactly the room sponsors want to be in. See Sponsorship for how that connects.