# How RevenueCat Sources One-of-a-Kind Venues Worldwide for Offsites, Meetups, and Conferences _Fintech · Nearly 200 employees · 7 min read_ How Workgrounds helps RevenueCat source hotels for a diverse travel portfolio of offsites, meetups, and a sold-out conference ## At a glance - **265** Hotels sourced - **20+** Markets - **37%** Below initial hotel quotes on average - **1–2** Requests per month RevenueCat helps app developers manage customer transactions, and since its founding in 2017, it has become one of the fastest-growing fintech SaaS companies in the world. To match its growth, the company has rapidly scaled its workforce from 40 people when it first started working with Workgrounds in 2023, to nearly 200 people today. Its hiring philosophy is simple: Build the most talented team possible by hiring around the world. The result is a globally distributed company with clusters of employees across North America, Asia, and Europe. Fully distributed companies usually treat travel as a necessary line item – the cost of keeping a remote team connected. For RevenueCat, travel goes deeper than that: It's how the company builds community around its brand. Internal offsites bring the team together around a shared culture, global meetups bring RevenueCat to developers wherever they are, and its flagship conference brings the whole ecosystem of customers, partners, and employees together in one room. RevenueCat's three event types look similar on a calendar, but each one asks something different of the planners behind the scenes. Most of that programming runs through Susannah Banks, RevenueCat's Chief of Staff, working alongside the events and finance teams – and increasingly, through Workgrounds. After three years of using Workgrounds, the team has sourced 265 hotels across 20+ markets at a steady clip of one to two requests a month, saving hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in the process. Here’s how. ## Internal Team Offsites: Sourcing for Capacity and Character RevenueCat has a specific point of view on what a company offsite should feel like, and it’s not a hotel ballroom. > "It would be much easier to just book a conference center in a big city. But I want our team to walk in and feel like this place is ours for the week, because that’s what inspires the real high-impact work," > > Susannah Banks, Chief of Staff, RevenueCat Many leaders have hosted an offsite where the agenda was strong, the goals were clear, the logistics were razor sharp, yet the room never quite came alive. Venue plays a larger role than those leaders might realize. A property with real character – somewhere you can live for the week rather than just check into, somewhere the team has entirely to itself – produces a different kind of offsite. For the past two years, that place has been a resort in Sundance, Utah. But RevenueCat has since outgrown that venue, flinging the search wide open again. RevenueCat's criteria are exacting but unconventional: a full venue buyout, enough rooms and communal space for the whole company, and within an hour of a major international airport. The company is market-agnostic, so there’s no obvious shortlist of cities. That's the type of blue sky brief that makes a manual search exhausting. But with Workgrounds, RevenueCat can send one structured RFP across every market worth considering at once. Offsite requests routinely span 10+ markets and return 10 or more properties per market in a consistent, comparable format, including the one-of-a-kind places a conventional search would never surface. > "For our company all-hands, we’re looking for a very unique type of property, and we’re open to any market in the world. That kind of search used to take us weeks, and it was impossible to properly compare all the options. Now with Workgrounds, it’s so easy," > > Susannah Banks, Chief of Staff, RevenueCat ## Community Meetups: Running a Global Events Calendar RevenueCat's developer community is global, and the company likes to show up for it in person. Its 2026 calendar alone spans Tokyo, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul, and Logroño, a small city in Spain's Rioja wine country – plus a retreat-style iOS conference in the Canadian Rockies and a developer meetup in Orlando. Sourced manually, a calendar this far-reaching is a full-time job that’s never actually done. By the time you've closed one market, three more are on the schedule. Each stop needs a hotel block for the internal team attending the event, sourced in a market that might not have an obvious go-to property. That's the same wide-net RFP process RevenueCat uses for its offsites, just compressed into smaller blocks and run on a rolling, near-monthly cadence as the events calendar moves around the world. Workgrounds lets the team run that search without needing a local contact or an on-the-ground agency in every city on the map. ## Conferences: Managing Three Guest Lists Under One Roof Conferences are where the sourcing complexity peaks for RevenueCat. Its flagship event, App Growth Annual (AGA), brings its app-developer community together in New York City each year. The 2026 event is set to be the largest yet, building on a 2025 event that sold out with a massive waitlist and attendees from more than 30 countries. Workgrounds supported the hotel sourcing for the 2025 event and is doing the same, at a greater scale, for 2026. Attending a conference requires a simple room block for your team. But hosting a conference like App Growth Annual means three separate hotel searches running in parallel, each with its own requirements: - Internal teams and staff, who need to be close to the conference venue and available at all hours - Partners and VIPs, who need a higher-end stay that’s walking distance to the conference and reflects the level of care RevenueCat wants to extend to its speakers and most important guests - General attendees, with a large primary block plus overflow capacity as registration grows Workgrounds sends out a separate RFP for each group, rather than RevenueCat trying to fit every attendee type into a single property. The proposals come back in an easy-to-compare format, and the locations are mapped and it’s obvious at a glance which properties sit inside each group's radius. And since every RFP carries its own criteria, the five-star options surface for VIPs while the staff shortlist stays extra close to the venue. > "Every hour spent coordinating a search this complex is an hour not spent on the actual agenda. Workgrounds gave us the space to focus on planning the conference, not the room blocks, while securing multiple properties that fit all our different needs," > > Susannah Banks, Chief of Staff, RevenueCat But hotel sourcing is only half of it. The room block payment structure is where a conference guest list gets truly complicated. Using Workgrounds, RevenueCat can split its blocks between master billing – where the company pays directly, typically used for internal staff and VIP guests – and IPO ("Individual Pays Own") blocks, where each guest pays for their own room, tax, and incidentals and handles that payment through the hotel. This split is crucial when the guest list is full of non-employees who shouldn't land on a corporate card, but should still get the pre-negotiated group rate. And personal nights are even trickier with an external guest list compared to an internal one. A speaker flying into NYC, for example, might want to stay the weekend. Those extra nights aren't part of what RevenueCat is hosting, and there's no reason the guest should have to ask permission. But typically there wouldn’t be a way to extend inside the block, and that guest would be left to book their extra nights separately. Workgrounds, however, makes it easy for any guest to add on personal nights while keeping the whole stay on one reservation and under the group rate. The payment is split automatically: conference nights go to RevenueCat's master account, and the guest can put extra nights on their own card, without anyone from RevenueCat needing to spend time on the logistics. ## The Result For RevenueCat, three core event types present three different challenges. The offsite is a broad search with no starting point. The meetup calendar is a dozen unfamiliar markets that turn over annually. The conference is a single event split into several different guest experiences. RevenueCat runs all of them through Workgrounds with ease and without switching tools. That has held as the company has grown. RevenueCat was a 40-person company running a handful of gatherings when it started with Workgrounds. Now, the offsite takes over an entire property, the meetup calendar circles the globe, and the conference is growing with three distinct guest lists. Sourcing has also stayed competitive as they’ve grown: Across 265 hotels, RevenueCat has booked at an average of 37% below the rates those hotels initially quoted. With Workgrounds in place, Banks and the RevenueCat team have time for the parts of travel programs that guests actually remember – the setting, the agenda, the relationships, and the things they learn and accomplish while they're there. Those elements are what make community central to RevenueCat's brand, and the reason customers, partners, and employees keep showing up at every event.