You may not need another app

You’re trying to choose a ticket price for a workshop, and it would help to see how attendance changes the budget. A calculator seems useful. Once you start thinking about it, you can imagine a dashboard too, perhaps with saved events and a booking system attached.

There’s plenty you could build. For this afternoon, though, you need to work out whether enough people are likely to book at a price that covers the room and materials.

Work through the question you have today

Take a hypothetical workshop with a $120 room charge, $8 of materials per attendee and a $20 ticket. At ten attendees, the $200 income covers those stated costs exactly. At fifteen, income reaches $300 against $240 in costs, leaving $60 before any other expenses. These are invented figures to illustrate the calculation.

A small interactive tool could help you explore what happens when attendance or ticket price changes. Seeing the numbers move may also prompt a useful question about costs you haven’t included yet, such as refreshments, payment fees or your own time.

OpenAI’s October 7 Intelligent UI announcement describes interactive responses and small tools in ChatGPT’s Chat experience. Its rollout began with paid tiers that day, followed by Free and Go expansion starting October 8; Enterprise availability depends on admin settings. The announcement leaves the models powering Work and Codex unchanged.

For someone planning a workshop, that offers another way to explore a calculation without first setting up a separate application.

Keep the assumptions beside the controls

You could ask: “Show how attendance changes the money left after the room and materials. Let me change attendance and ticket price, and keep the costs you’re using visible.”

Before relying on the answer, try a couple of values you can check yourself. In our example, ten attendees should break even and fifteen should leave $60 on the stated costs. If the results disagree, you’ll want to sort out the calculation before spending time on how the interface looks.

A table may be easier to use than a slider, particularly if you only need to compare three likely attendance figures. Choose whichever helps you understand the decision with the least fuss.

Consider who will use it next

The requirements change when a colleague wants to use the calculation for next month’s workshop. They’ll need to find the relevant version, understand the assumptions and update the room price without losing the calculation you agreed on.

At that point, try the things the team will actually do: reopen the work, share it with the intended people and use it on their devices. Check keyboard access, and decide who will correct the formula if someone finds a mistake. Those are questions to verify in your setup; this article uses a hypothetical budget and public documentation, with no firsthand Intelligent UI test.

If your team needs a common record over time, a shared spreadsheet or maintained application may be a more convenient home. The occasional calculator and the recurring budgeting process can each earn their place, depending on how much needs to survive the original conversation.

Leave yourself a useful record

For today’s decision, save the inputs, the assumptions and the result that informed the ticket price. A short note may be enough to explain your choice later. If the tool becomes part of a recurring process, use harmless example figures while checking that colleagues can reopen it and work from the same version.

In our workshop example, the organizer now knows how attendance affects the budget and which costs still need checking. That’s enough to continue planning while the broader question of a booking system waits its turn.

You can always build the app when the work calls for it. In the meantime, there are tickets to price and a workshop to put on, and a small tool that helps you get there has done something worthwhile.