The typical per person badge printer fee is upwards of $150 per day for the printer + laptop setup and $250-$500 per day for the labor .. you have to keep in mind travel, insurance, taxes, facilities fees etc ...
Over the last ten+ years we have built a registration system very similar to cevent. Cevent got 50 million in funding and well it's just hard to compete with that. We plan on open sourcing the majority of the system soon(we started testing the installer yesterday - failed badly on godaddy). What I picked up from this article was that you had 'buzz' any ideas on how I can create buzz for this project?
There are quite a few of these already. The biggest difference(and most useful) is the level of integration between the event management and registration software and the app.