'Do you charge to speak' is a question organisers are often too awkward to ask directly, and speakers are often too vague in answering. Here's a transparent answer for how I decide.
My default: free for student communities
For engineering college talks, workshops and mentorship sessions, I speak free and ask only for travel costs if on-site. Students are exactly the audience I want to reach, and the trust that builds compounds — see why I speak at colleges for free.
Where a fee makes sense for any speaker
- A corporate or for-profit event where the organisation itself has a real budget line for speakers.
- A significant time commitment beyond a single session — a multi-day workshop series, ongoing advisory work.
- Repeated, exclusive engagements that displace other paid or personal time in a material way.
Asking directly, early, in the first email, saves both sides an awkward third message. See how to invite a guest speaker to college.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
