We put on a technology conference each year in Raleigh, NC for about 300 people and charge 20.00 per person for the 3days and still make a profit. It's next weekend, come check it out http://Carolinacon.org I'm not sure why conventions cost so much, we don't even have sponsors.
To do that for 300 people is pretty impressive but you do need to consider that scale matters.
Think about it, a small WordPress blog on Dreamhost only costs $9/month, but Amazon needs giant datacenters to host EC2 and S3.
For your event you have about 12 presentations, so you don't need to do a huge amount of pre-planning or working with speakers. That makes a big difference.
From the schedule it looks like you are using one mid-sized plenary room plus maybe 1 or 2 side rooms. You are actually doing the hotel a favour by filling up a small block of rooms, they often have empty spaces when bigger events are going on, so everything they charge you is profit as far as they are concerned.
If the hotel has their own builtin projection equipment and you're bringing in your own computers, that seriously cuts the AV costs.
Big conferences tend to suffer from diseconomies of scale. The more you need to do, the bigger the per unit costs become. The hotel isn't likely to provide you with free projectors and screens when you need dozens at a time. That is magnified through every aspect of the conference.
Usually a small conference solves it's problems with work. You spend a lot of hours making sure everything works, but for big conferences, the staffing levels don't tend to increase proportionally with the number of attendees. For big conferences only some problems can be solved with time and effort.
There are fixed costs - rooms are $X, whether you've got 50 people or 200 people (obviously within reason - 2000 people need more space than 50). Our/my biggest issue has been getting a greater number of people there.
That's great that you've made a profit. Do you reimburse your speakers for travel if they need it? What sort of food are you providing for $20 ticket cost?
You are collecting approximately $6000. If we didn't reimburse any speaker travel, skipped an organized closing event, and cut a few other corners, we could get close to that in terms of costs, and having 300 people attend would mean we'd be able to keep ticket prices low. You're "closely associated with various "2600" chapters across NC, SC, TN, VA, LA, DC, and NY" - I'm sure that's helped you get the word out for speakers and attendees much beyond what many other conferences (including ours) are able to do, especially with a limited budget.
Congrats on your event. I've got family in town this week and next, and am not sure if I'll be able to attend, but will attend if I can.
