I was very excited to see this deal from HeySummit, as I had been wanting to host an online conference and this would be way cheaper than some of the other options out there, and I love the "done for you" set up.

However, what was good in theory did NOT work out AT ALL in practicality.

First of all, I didn't realize HeySummit is located overseas. Which means that when people pay, the money hits currency exchange rates TWICE plus Paypal fees by the time it gets to me, resulting in an unexpected huge loss of revenue.

They do give you the option to pay to have the money sent directly to you (instead of going through them first) BUT then they take away PayPal as a payment option.

The emails are done for you, but they are BARELY customizable. I wanted to send separate emails to people who had purchased a free ticket than a paid ticket (so I could send a workbook to paying customers), but you can't do that.

Zapier wasn't an option yet during my conference dates, so I had to go in and MANUALLY download the attendee list multiple times a day so I could get people's emails sent out and up-to-date through my customer service provider (Hoping I didn't miss any unsubscribes! Who knows??).

(Plus, the "export" feature didn't work most of the time, so that was fun...)

Then, they added Zapier (yay!). Except I have literally spend the last TWO MONTHS working with both HeySummit and Zapier customer service to make the zap work, and keep having problem after problem. Every time, it's a different issue and a "Thanks for catching that bug!" email. I do not have the time to personally catch all of their bugs for them.

The biggest issue now is that HeySummit sends information to Zapier as soon as a person BEGINS the check-out process, not when they complete payment. So even if we could get Zapier to work, everyone who abandons cart still gets the emails as though they are signed up. They don't currently provide an option to filter this.

Customer service is very friendly and seems to genuinely want to help, but this product is absolutely not ready for market -- unless you want the simplest possible conference you can possibly think of. (And even then??)

I really wanted this to work out because I love the idea, but I can NOT keep contacting customer support every time yet another thing goes wrong. Hopefully they will grow and improve. I'd love to see them succeed. But unfortunately, this has been an absolute awful experience for me and I will not be using them in the future for additional conferences.