What it would have cost to rent

Nothing Rented is a five-part series from Queen City Garage on how we built our own email and RSVP systems for NASCAR Sundays instead of renting them. Read the whole series.

Prices updated September 27, 2026, from each company's own pricing page.

NASCAR Sundays needs three things: a website, a mailing list and a way to take RSVPs. We priced the cheapest paid plan from the well-known companies that sell each one. Free plans exist, but they come with limits on sending, seats and features, and a business that runs parties every week in two cities outgrows them.

The website

• Squarespace Basic: $19 a month billed annually ($25 month to month), about $228 a year.
• Wix Light: $17 a month billed yearly, about $204 a year.

The mailing list

• Mailchimp Essentials: from $13 a month, about $156 a year.
• Kit Creator: $390 a year billed yearly ($33 month to month).
• Beehiiv Scale: $517 a year billed yearly ($43 month to month).

RSVPs and events

• Eventbrite Pro, which adds email marketing: from $15 a month, about $180 a year. Paid tickets also carry a service fee of 3.7 percent plus $1.79 per ticket, and 2.9 percent for payment processing.
• Luma Plus: $59 a month billed annually, about $708 a year.

Put one from each category together and you have the stack most event businesses run. The cheapest combination here, Wix, Mailchimp and Eventbrite, comes to roughly $540 a year. A common one, Squarespace, Kit and Luma Plus, comes to roughly $1,326 a year. Every email service on the list charges more as the list grows.

Those are not ruinous numbers, and that is the point of this post. We did not build our own because renting was unaffordable. We built it because of what renting leaves you with: three companies, three logins and three separate copies of the same person, none of them yours. When a fan signs up for the email and RSVPs to a party, the email company and the event company each keep their own copy of that person, and nothing connects the two. The rest of this series is about why that mattered more than the price.

What a person did: priced the market. What the machine did: read the pricing pages.