How Much Does a Virtual Waiting Room Cost?

Real prices in this category start at free and run to £106,116 a year. Queue-Fair’s paid service starts at £150/month (≈$199). CrowdHandler’s at $190/month. Queue-it’s cheapest published plan is $1,499 for a single event, or $5,999 a year for unlimited events.

The numbers exist, mostly not where you’d look for them. Queue-Fair keeps prices off its own website and publishes them in full on its G2 profile. CrowdHandler is the only one of the nine with a complete price list on its own pricing page. Queue-it publishes its entry-level bundles and nothing above them, but filed a full price list running to £106,116 a year with the UK government’s G-Cloud 14 procurement framework, where anyone can read it.

Below: what each provider charges and where we found it, what drives your number, and what to send a vendor to get a quote you can compare against another. If you already know your traffic figures, our cost calculator will place you on the published bands and build the quote request for you.

What’s published, and where

Nine providers. Three publish a price on their own site. Two of those publish the whole ladder; the third publishes only its smallest bundles, and the rest of its range is public solely because it had to file it with the government.

The bottom four are worth a word of context. Section and Macrometa are edge compute platforms where the waiting room is one feature inside a much larger product, so their pricing reflects the whole platform rather than the queue. PeakProtect focuses on events, festivals and stadia, and reports managing overload traffic for more than 50 websites. Simple Queue is CDN-compatible and supports native mobile apps. None of the four has meaningful review data, and none will give you a number without a conversation.

One route worth knowing about: NetFUNNEL is listed on AWS Marketplace, sold by private offer. If your organisation already commits spend to AWS, buying through the marketplace can draw down that commitment and skip a separate procurement cycle. The price still comes from a conversation, but the paperwork is shorter. Queue-it lists there too.

Queue-Fair’s own pricing page doesn’t display specific numbers, on the basis that finding the right plan requires a conversation. Its G2 profile lists both editions with prices attached, last updated January 2026. If you want Queue-Fair’s entry price without talking to anyone, G2 is where it is.

The published numbers

CrowdHandler

Five paid bands plus a free tier. Prices exclude VAT, billed monthly, no minimum term. Correct as of July 2026.

Queue-Fair

Two editions, per its G2 profile.

“From” is doing work in that second row. Queue-Fair’s paid plan carries no hard technical caps. Unlimited queue size, unlimited waiting rooms, outflow set to whatever you want. But its most common commercial model is usage-based, priced on how many visitors you have and how often they queue. £150 (roughly $199) is the floor, not the number. You still need a quote to know your actual cost; you just know where it starts.

Queue-it

Queue-it publishes prices in two places, and between them they miss the middle of its range.

Essentials, on its own site. Four bundles aimed at smaller events. All billed annually, all quoted in USD.

Every bundle stops at 5,000 visitors in the queue per event, and that cap is the defining feature of the tier. Within it you get a scheduled waiting room, an AI-generated custom theme, 20+ connectors, real-time metrics, adjustable throughput, branded waiting rooms, first-in-first-out ordering, waiting rooms in 50+ languages, unlimited admin accounts and 24/5 technical support.

What isn’t included: bot and abuse management, 24/7 peak protection, “your turn” email notifications and additional waiting rooms are all paid add-ons, as are extra visitors in queue if you outgrow the 5,000.

Queue-it does state that a site exceeding its plan stays protected, with a follow-up conversation about adjusting it, rather than the queue failing mid-event. That’s a meaningful commitment and worth getting in writing from any vendor.

Everything above Essentials, via the government. Queue-it’s larger tiers list feature and volume limits with a contact prompt against each price. Its G2 profile does the same.

Then there’s G-Cloud. To sell to UK public sector buyers, suppliers must file a price list with the government’s Digital Marketplace, and it’s published. Queue-it’s submission to G-Cloud 14 gives its full annual pricing, current as of 29 October 2024, excluding VAT. Each price covers one account and one concurrent waiting room unless stated.

Read the feature lists alongside the prices and the ladder makes more sense. Standard 1, at £16,368, is the bare service. No custom theme. No API. No bot and abuse management. No traffic insights or email notifications. Those start at Standard 2, at £35,724. Pro 2 at £89,580 adds 24/7 peak protection, native app connectors, white label, load testing and a second waiting room. Enterprise at £106,116.40 covers up to 10 million redirected users a month across four rooms.

One caveat on that table, and it matters. The G-Cloud filing dates from October 2024 and describes the ladder as it stood then. Essentials didn’t exist yet, and it now includes a custom theme at a fraction of Standard 2’s price. So read the G-Cloud list as the shape of Queue-it’s enterprise range rather than as a current quote for anything.

The 14% average discount Queue-it reviewers report on G2 applies to both. Treat every figure above as a ceiling. It’s still the only complete Queue-it price list in public, and it lines up with the perceived cost of $$$$$ that Queue-it reviewers give it on G2, the top of a five-point scale.

NetFUNNEL

NetFUNNEL’s base subscription comes by private offer, so there’s no headline figure. Its AWS Marketplace listing does publish the usage rates for the Small package:

• $0.015 per additional monthly active user
• $0.30 per additional Small PCCU unit, PCCU being peak concurrent users

That’s a fourth way of counting. CrowdHandler bills on how many people are in the queue at once. Queue-it bills on events and, higher up, on users redirected per month. NetFUNNEL bills on monthly actives and peak concurrency together. Four vendors, four metrics, and no way to line them up without doing arithmetic on your own traffic first.

The rates are half a picture without the base subscription, and the listing won’t give you that. One warning if you go looking: AWS displays an apparent price of $8,333,333 a month against the listing. That’s a placeholder AWS uses for private-offer products. Nobody pays it.

What customers actually report paying

Almost nothing. We looked across review platforms, procurement benchmarking services and public forums and found no customer-reported figures in circulation. Buyers sign quotes under commercial terms and don’t publish them, and no SaaS benchmarking service currently carries transaction data for these vendors. Government procurement is the exception, which is why Queue-it’s G-Cloud filing remains the most complete public account of its larger tiers, and Queue-it didn’t publish that one by choice.

Two data points exist, both published by vendors as testimonials, and both should be read as chosen rather than typical:

• A Queue-Fair customer describes queuing over 16,000 people for an event and paying under £150 (≈$199) for it.
• A Queue-it customer states that autoscaling for every traffic spike “would cost more than double what we pay for Queue-it”. A relative figure with no absolute attached.

If you’re building a business case, there’s no market rate to anchor against. CrowdHandler’s ladder, Queue-Fair’s £150 floor and Queue-it’s two published lists are the only fixed points. Everything else is negotiated in private.

Why the prices are hidden

It looks like evasion. It’s mostly arithmetic.

Peak demand varies by a factor of a thousand or more. A regional theatre releasing 400 seats might peak at a few hundred people queuing. A stadium tour on-sale can peak in the hundreds of thousands. The Oasis reunion sale in August 2024 drew roughly 14 million people and bots to ticketing platforms in a single morning. Same software, entirely different infrastructure behind it.

One list price would either be unaffordable for the theatre or ruinous for the vendor carrying the stadium. Frequency compounds it: a retailer needing two hours of cover on Black Friday and a government portal needing it every weekday morning consume vastly different amounts of the same product.

CrowdHandler bands it publicly and quotes above the top band. Queue-Fair publishes a floor and quotes from there. Queue-it publishes its smallest bundles, quotes everything above them, and had its enterprise range made public only by procurement rules.

Free tiers

Two of the nine offer a permanent free plan. Queue-Fair and CrowdHandler. Neither asks for a card, and neither expires.

Queue-Fair will hold an unlimited number of people. CrowdHandler stops at 100. That sounds like the whole story and isn’t, because both release visitors at the same 10 a minute.

Ten a minute is 600 an hour. Five thousand people turn up for your on-sale and the last one waits past eight hours. Free keeps your site up. It doesn’t give you a queue anyone will sit in. Use it to test the platform before you pay, or as insurance against a spike you didn’t plan for.

None of the other seven has a permanent free plan. Queue-it markets a free trial, but it’s arranged through a sales conversation rather than a self-serve signup, so it isn’t something you can start this afternoon. Macrometa offers no trial at all.

What the first paid plan buys

CrowdHandler’s Starter is $190 a month. That gets you one waiting room, 1,000 people in the queue, 60 released a minute, and a 48-hour support SLA. Queue-Fair’s Unlimited Service is £150, roughly $199, and removes the caps. Queue-it’s Essentials bundles start at $1,499 for one event, or about $499 a month for unlimited events.

Everything in CrowdHandler’s Starter is in the Queue-Fair plan, and then it carries on. Outgrow 1,000 people in the queue and CrowdHandler moves you to Standard at $800. Queue-Fair doesn’t move you anywhere, because there’s no band to leave.

Queue-it’s Essentials tier sits in the same conversation as the other two, which its enterprise pricing would never suggest. At roughly $499 a month for unlimited events it’s about two and a half times Queue-Fair’s floor, not the tenfold gap the G-Cloud list implies. Where it separates is the cap: 5,000 visitors per event, against CrowdHandler’s 5,000 at its $800 Standard tier and no cap at all on Queue-Fair’s paid plan. On queue size alone, Essentials lands between CrowdHandler’s Starter and Standard, which is a defensible place to be. Go past 5,000 and you’re buying add-ons, or moving to a tier with no published price.

You can check where your own traffic lands with the cost calculator. What you give up with Queue-Fair is knowing the number before you ask. Queue-Fair charges on usage, so £150 is where the meter starts, and nothing published tells you what 50,000 people through a queue does to a monthly bill. That’s a shopping problem, not an ongoing one. Queue-Fair quotes against your actual event and the model is fixed once you have it, so you’ll know exactly how your costs behave from the first call. You just can’t work it out from the website first, and CrowdHandler’s customers can.

What actually drives your price

Every vendor prices on some combination of the following. If a quote surprises you, one of these is why.

Peak concurrent visitors

The biggest factor by some distance. Not monthly traffic. The maximum number who could be sitting in the queue simultaneously at the worst moment. Most buyers underestimate this and meet it again during an overage conversation.

Outflow rate

Visitors per minute released from the front. Set by what your own infrastructure absorbs, and it determines how long the last person waits. A 20,000-person queue at 300/min clears in about an hour. The same queue at 60/min takes over five.

Frequency and duration

One two-hour on-sale is a different proposition to permanent cover. One-off event pricing usually wins for the former, subscriptions for the latter. The crossover is worth calculating rather than assuming. Queue-it prices this explicitly at the entry level, charging per event up to three a year and switching to an annual fee beyond that.

Waiting rooms and domains

Most plans cap both. If you run several brands, or need separate queues per product in the same sale, check this line first. It’s a common reason a quote lands higher than expected.

Features

Bot mitigation, device fingerprinting, priority access, API control, SSO, full HTML control of the queue page. Some vendors bundle, some tier. Queue-it’s Essentials bundles exclude bot and abuse management, 24/7 peak protection and email notifications, all sold as add-ons, and its G-Cloud filing puts API management and invite-only access above the entry tier as well. Queue-Fair includes everything on its paid plan.

Support and SLA

If your event starts at 9am on a Saturday, a 48-hour response SLA is decorative. This is often a bigger line item than the queuing.

The four pricing models you’ll meet

One-off event. A defined window. Suits an annual on-sale or single drop. Cheapest if you genuinely need it once. Queue-it’s $1,499 single-event bundle is the clearest published example.

Subscription. Fixed fee for a capacity band. Predictable, usually cheaper past three or four events a year. Watch minimum terms. Queue-Fair typically runs on a rolling three-month basis, which G2 reviewers flag as awkward for seasonal use, though several note flexible arrangements were accommodated on request.

Usage / pay-as-you-go. Priced on visitors through the queue and how often they queue. Efficient for unpredictable demand, harder to budget. Queue-Fair’s most common model.

Flat rate. Always-on cover at a fixed price regardless of throughput. Suits large sites wanting permanent protection.

What to send a vendor to get a comparable quote

Quotes come back non-comparable because buyers describe their situation differently to each vendor. Send all five of these, identically, to everyone on your shortlist.

• Expected peak concurrent visitors. The maximum in the queue at once. If you’ve had an outage, your analytics from that day are the best source you’ll get. If not, take your largest previous event and assume the next is bigger.
• Required outflow rate. Visitors per minute your site handles without degrading. Load testing gives you this properly. If you haven’t tested, say so. A good vendor will help you work it out, a bad one will guess.
• Number and duration of events per year. “Four on-sales, roughly two hours of peak each” is a quote. “We’re quite busy sometimes” is not.
• Waiting rooms and domains needed. One queue on one domain, or separate queues per product across three brands.
• Non-negotiable features and SLA. Bot protection, custom branding, API access, and the support response you actually need mid-event.

With those five figures, every quote prices the same thing. Without them, you’re comparing guesses. The cost calculator takes the same inputs and writes the request out for you, including the questions worth asking about exclusions, overage and minimum term.

How to compare quotes without getting caught

Compare total commitment, not headline rate. A monthly price on a three-month minimum is a three-month price, and a per-event price billed annually is an annual commitment.

Ask what happens on overage. If you exceed your band mid-event, does the queue keep working and you settle up after, or does something break? Queue-it states sites stay protected past plan limits with a follow-up conversation. Get the equivalent in writing from anyone else.

Read what the entry tier excludes. Cheapest plans are cheapest for a reason, usually features or SLA. Map the exclusions against your list of non-negotiables before comparing anything.

Negotiate. Queue-it reviewers report an average discount of 14% on G2, so the list conversation is not the last conversation. Queue-Fair publicly offers 25% below any comparable competitor quote, which means a quote from someone else has direct cash value to you. Collect at least two either way.

Is it worth it?

Run the numbers against the downside, not against your software budget.

Costco’s website went down for roughly 16.5 hours over the Thanksgiving weekend in 2019, at an estimated cost of around $11 million in missed sales. The most expensive published plan in this category is Queue-it’s Enterprise tier at £106,116 a year. CrowdHandler’s top tier is $67,200.

For a retailer with a Black Friday that isn’t a close call. For a business whose worst day is a mildly busy Tuesday it is, and for plenty of sites autoscaling and a CDN will do the job for less money and less integration work. A virtual waiting room pays for itself when demand is spiky, large, and able to take you offline at the moment revenue is on the table.

If that isn’t your situation, don’t buy one. If it is, both free tiers will tell you whether the platform works before you spend anything.