The DIY stack is how most teams start: a Google Form behind a QR code, a spin-wheel app on a tablet, gift counting on trust, and a spreadsheet to clean up afterwards. Every tool is free. The stack still has a cost, and it is paid in hours and in leads that go cold.
The DIY stack is not a company, it is a habit. A free survey tool captures the contact. A QR generator prints the link. A separate wheel app spins for prizes with no connection to the form. Gifts go out on the honour system. After the show, someone exports the CSV, dedupes copy-paste errors, guesses which leads mattered, and emails the list to sales a week later.
To be fair, it works. Nothing breaks. Every tool is free and familiar, and for a one-off table at a local meetup it is genuinely enough. The problems only show up at a real booth: the wheel has no idea who filled the form, the same visitor grabs two gifts, nobody scored anything, and the follow-up goes out after the leads have gone cold.
Scaniam is the same flow with the seams removed. One QR code runs the survey, the game, the gift code, and the rep scoring as a single chain, so the data arrives connected and already qualified. The free plan exists precisely so the DIY comparison is fair: at zero dollars, the difference is not price, it is the weekend.
| Scaniam | The DIY booth stack | |
|---|---|---|
| License cost | $0 on the free plan. Premium at $149/mo raises the monthly response volume. | $0. Google Forms, QR generators, and wheel apps are free. |
| Time per event | About 2 minutes to set up. Data arrives clean, connected, and scored. | Hours of setup and hours of post-show cleanup, deduping, and formatting. |
| Survey to game link | One chain. The game only plays after the survey, and the prize is tied to the response. | None. The wheel app does not know who filled the form. |
| Gift tracking | Single-use codes. One gift per attendee, stock counted automatically. | Honour system. Double-dipping is invisible. |
| Qualification | Rep scores each lead hot, warm, or cold at the booth. | Done from memory, days later, if at all. |
| Duplicates & junk | Server-side dedup, work-email rules, and format validation at entry. | Whatever was typed is what you get. |
| ROI answer | Cross-event dashboard plus an AI executive summary on Premium. | A pivot table, if someone builds it. |
The DIY stack is free the way a puppy is free. For a small one-off event it is honestly fine, and we say so. The moment a booth costs real money, the gaps start billing you: unscored leads, double-dipped gifts, and a cleanup weekend per show. Scaniam's free plan runs the whole connected flow at the same license price as the DIY stack: zero.
Yes, and for a small one-off event it can be enough. A Google Form behind a QR code captures contacts. What it cannot do is connect a game to the form, stop gift double-dipping, score leads at the booth, or dedupe entries, so at a paid booth those gaps usually cost more than a tool would.
A standalone wheel app has no link to your capture form, so anyone can spin without leaving their details, and prizes are not tied to any lead. On Scaniam the game only unlocks after the survey, and the prize and gift code are recorded on that specific response.
Yes. The free plan includes the survey builder, all five games, gift codes, the Sales Station, and the dashboard, with a monthly response limit. Paid plans raise the volume, not the feature set, so the DIY comparison at zero dollars is like for like.
A local meetup, a school fair, a table with a few dozen visitors and no follow-up planned. If nobody will ever ask what the event returned, a free form is fine. The DIY stack stops being the right call the day someone asks for the pipeline number.
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