That was a good read, hope you enjoyed your visit @fossdot ! I thought it best to respond here rather than on the blog
Making the conference sustainable needs us to reduce the big ticket items first. I guess #1 is venue rent.
We’d have to follow the FOSDEM model for this - which of course isn’t new. We’d have to find some institution that is willing to help us host this at a much lower fee (ideally “free”). Engineering college or university or even other government research institutions that are open to such things. The devroom model kind of flows from this - devrooms are classrooms or seminar halls. As IndiaFOSS gains more visibility and reputation, I’d say this will become feasible - certainly something we can even consider next year itself (consider sure, but not bank upon).
Next big ticket item is food. My personal opinion is that food must be included as part of the ticket itself. Meaning the ticket will never be cheaper than the cost of the food. My experience has been it’s a mess in many places where they try to charge for food, and ultimately it’s not as if the attendees pay less, or get better convenience.
Beyond that we have things like video recording and live-streaming. We are looking at the video box and other approaches. These we should shift to do carefully in-house, with volunteers - and a careful mix of owned and rental equipment, plus professional work engaged as necessary. We could consider a model where say student volunteers (or others) do like half day or one day of handling the video setup, an rest of the time attend the conference. This would be a good way to get some enthusiastic students as well.
Goes without saying that we have to attract more local volunteers. That’s an important part of sustainability.
Hopefully with all these we can “save” some money from the sponsorships. That may help us weather Industry funding cycles. So far we’ve been fortunate, but a downturn is bound to happen sometime or the other. And we must be prepared.
In terms of review load, we’re already doing devrooms - where review load is shared. The process isn’t smooth yet. We’ll get some structured feedback from the devrooms and the main track reviewers and see how we can make it smoother.
I sometimes think of a TicToc model for IndiaFOSS. Think Intel, not that social media app! Basically we change the conference in some ways one year, and improve it, refine the rough edges, make it smooth and more efficient the next year. So IndiaFOSS 2025 will be Tic - we’ve added devrooms (almost 50% community curated talks!), running a bigger conf (more attendees, more booths?), overall more volunteer work compared to last year. We aren’t done with Tic, and we will keep track things so that we can deliver a Toc that is better in every way.
Regarding documentation, etc. That’s the coming soon task that I see on the horizon for every volunteer team in FOSS United, not just IndiaFOSS 
Yes, FYI, FOSDEM spends an equal proportion of their budget on the venue; unfortunately, it isn’t free. However, if we are able to scale (8k+ people) with the same proportion of expense on venue rental, it would be huge. Partnering with an institution should be our way to scale as well.
I understand the convenience aspect, but right now, we spend more on food than the average ticket price. This means we starts losing money on providing food, and then there are other costs like venue rental, AV, etc.
I am not suggesting (or in favor of) increasing the ticket price, but we need to find a way to reduce losses and also keep inflation in mind. To begin with, we can consider removing breakfast and coffee from the paid stalls instead of including them with the conference ticket?
I completely agree. We need to have a reserve of 1–2 times the IndiaFOSS budget so it doesn’t struggle financially or die during a couple of bad sponsorship seasons.
I just had a look at the last years budget - close to 13L. Looks like the ticket is actually “free” for students (399 Rs). Enthusiast ticket of this year at 799 is at the edge of average food cost…
In fact 399 is the edge of food costs one would pay for at the “Darshinis” (local stand and eat hotel). 2 x breakfast (fixed items) + 2 x lunch (fixed thali) + 2 x tea+snacks => 2x(60+120+30) = 420 is actually close to rock bottom costs.
In hindsight I’d say we are missing an opportunity to say we’re giving FREE conference tickets 
. After-all, “free” is free as in “freedom” rather than as in “free beer”.
One middle path may be to to make food costs “transparent” in some way. Provide 3 levels of choice: No food, breakfast+mini meals and breakfast+full meals. Breakfast is useful to ensure the attendees land early. Coupon level selling doesn’t make our life easier in terms of estimates - so me feels this is a good middle path. Add-ons like all day tea/coffee can be coupon based, and paid for.
Here’s why I am batting for different tiers for lunch: the last Barcamp we had a 120 Rs packed lunch. It wasn’t enough for me! But I found that many people were saying it was “too much food”. Some even threw some away. (It was a reasonable lunch and certainly not bad)
Do we know what our audience expects in terms of food ?
I think this is exactly the sort of thing where we need to get data from people who actually come to the conference. A survey perhaps. With that data, we can take a call for the next conference.
Thanks for replying.
Yeah, It’s worth doing a survey for the next year planning.