open sauce review: the bay area festival has lost its spark
It’s 10:15am on Saturday, and William Osman takes the Main Stage at Open Sauce along with Kevin, NileRed and Allen Pan. The four YouTubers, who are known for posting science-related content to their individual channels, frequently collaborate on a podcast called Safety Third.
While Osman takes the lead on Open Sauce, having spearheaded the event since its debut in 2023, these four creators appear to be a sort of unit behind the convention, which is in its fourth iteration in 2026. For the uninitiated, Open Sauce is a two-day event in the San Francisco Bay Area focussing on science and maker culture, with a large expo hall that is something of a science fair, and a heavy emphasis on YouTube creators in the niche. In short, it’s a cross between VidCon and Maker Faire.
As Osman and company take their seats, the buzz in the audience is palpable. This first panel of the actual event—there was actually a full day yesterday for industry members—is titled “Welcome to Open Sauce! Safety Third welcomes everyone to the fourth annual Open Sauce!” It’s confounding, then, that the discussion veers immediately into the worst accidents they’ve had while driving. They describe the journey they took to Open Sauce by driving a Taylor-Dunn (currently on display outside) north from LA to the Bay Area.
Thirty minutes of rambling conclude with a cheerful “Have a good Open Sauce!” with zero details about the convention itself. No mentions of things to look out for in the exhibit halls, no directions to specific locations, no shoutouts of panels the four of them are personally excited for. This lack of focus turns out to be emblematic of Open Sauce.
One Hour Ago…
The line outside the San Mateo County Event Center for General Admission stretches into the parking lot half an hour before the 10am entry time. The mood is upbeat. Staff scan QR codes and hand out Open Sauce badges, which are circuit boards that can be soldered and programmed during the event.
Attendees include exactly the tech-y and artsy folk you’d imagine, plus a fair number of kids. While many travel from out of state and out of the country to this festival, I’m reminded that we are in Silicon Valley by the conversations I overhear. Waiting in line, two men who have just met talk about their jobs at AI companies. Nearby, a twenty-something-year-old loudly mansplains that the event’s name, “Open Sauce”, is a pun on “open source”.
Tickets for Open Sauce are a complicated affair. This year, there’s a line allowing 9am entries for Industry ($834.15), VIP ($1,553.42) and those who bought a special “I Hate Waiting” add-on ($136.63 on top of your regular ticket), which is hard to justify as anything other than a cash grab. The whole 45 minutes I wait to be allowed in with the masses, I see only three or four people use the expedited line.
Perhaps the biggest sign that Open Sauce’s best days are behind it came with 2026’s ticket options. In previous years, a middle-of-the-road Premium ticket ($395 in 2025) allowed attendees early entry along with guaranteed “creator meet and greet discussions”. These were small group discussions with creators, which could be reserved with a preference list ahead of time. This year, the VIP ticket is the only way to get personal access to the creators, and it’s not even a guarantee. The small creator discussions that were a selling point of the earlier years, and reminiscent of early VidCon, have been scrapped entirely.
A third stage that existed last year, in 2025, at the same venue, has been removed in favour of more exhibition space, losing the option for more programming that would help to ease the crowds and feature other creators. In fact, there are many repeat guests across panels over the weekend—more chances to catch your favourite star, to be sure, but fewer to discover new, smaller creators.
Open Sauce Ticket Prices Comparison
Open Sauce 2023: July 15-16 at Pier 35
- General Admission: $95 regular / $75.69 early bird
- Premium Admission: $350
- VIP Admission: $999
Open Sauce 2024: July 15-16 at Cow Palace
- General Admission: $200 regular / $150 just bird / $99.99 early bird / $69.69 early early bird
- Premium Admission: $395
- Industry Admission: $495 early bird (sold out)
- VIP Admission: $1,499
- Open Sauce at Home (1 year access to video archive): $40 per year
- Sunday Admission: $99
Open Sauce 2025: July 19-20 at San Mateo County Event Center
- General Admission: $200 regular / $150.69 bird / $99.69 early bird
- Premium Admission: $395
- Industry Admission: $750
- VIP Admission: $1,499
- Sunday Admission: $135
Open Sauce 2026: July 18-19 at San Mateo County Event Center
- General Admission: $216.75 regular / $163.35 early bird / $131.28 super early bird
- Industry Admission: $834.15
- VIP Admission: $1,553.42
- I Hate Waiting ticket add-on: $136.63
- Sunday Admission: $120
- Ultimate Bots Fight Night: $29.73
In effect, the distance between fan and creator has never been so large. As the event has grown, it’s taken away the opportunities for meaningful interactions with any of the creators, who typically won’t be found wandering the exhibit halls and might not even show up in the VIP area for a $1,553.42 meet-and-greet.
It’s evident from the panels that creators aren’t on the same level as their fans, anyway. On the main stage, one creator jokes about the audience, “They’re supposed to look up to us,” and I have a feeling they believe it. It’s a sentiment antithetical to the original influencer “I’m-just-like-you” profile, but nonetheless revealing about the creator/fan relationship today.
Gone are the days of talking down the camera as if to a friend in your garage—with a notable exception in Colin Furze, who speaks about keeping this spirit alive in a panel aptly about how YouTube has changed. For the most part, featured creators at Open Sauce have big teams and crews. In many panels, they casually throw out numbers upwards of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, when talking about projects. It’s difficult to relate.
Money continues to be a theme throughout the weekend. Creators talk business-speak instead of science-speak, using terms like “diversifying my income stream.” One talks about their many channels and how they’ve succeeded in “monetising all my hobbies.” William Osman spends half the “Homesteading” panel asking for advice about his broken excavator, until another creator offers to hook him up with a sponsor for a new one.
It feels bleak and mercenary, contrary to the older generation of YouTubers—Destin Sandlin and JerryRigEverything are standouts here—who arrived before the promise of a lucrative career, and speak on their panel about making videos just because they loved it.
To paint all the panels in a negative light is unfair, however. There are still great panels, and it’s easy to identify them. A structured panel with a prepared moderator should be the baseline for any convention, but that’s not the case at Open Sauce. More than once, a creator shows up claiming, “I just found out I was going to be on this ten minutes ago,” when their name has been on the agenda for weeks. It comes across as unprofessional rather than endearing.
Like the fab four who opened the show with a meandering conversation about their Taylor-Dunn, creators seem to think that just hearing them speak about anything under the sun is enough for the audience. But, this is not a livestream, and people have paid hundreds of dollars to be here in person.
On stage, creators without a plan often admit to stalling or having to burn time. However, despite the mikes being set up in the aisles, the moderator and panelists rarely save time for questions from the audience. It’s baffling that they don’t think of soliciting audience questions when the whole premise of Open Sauce is supposed to be how much creators love interacting with their fans.
Mystifyingly, a game show based on Family Feud is hosted by someone who hasn’t seen the television show, and another based on Jeopardy! is hyper-focussed on getting creators to eat hot sauce like it’s a YouTube cinnamon challenge circa 2012.
An electric YouTube personality does not necessarily translate to the stage, where there is no editor, script, retakes, or visual effects. YouTubers don’t automatically make great moderators, especially when they don’t put the work in to prepare questions, or, in some cases, they don’t learn the names of the people on their panel. On many occasions, speakers don’t bother to introduce themselves, assuming that the audience already knows who they are—a rookie mistake for anyone trying to, say, grow their audience.
That said, when there is effort and the right personality leading the conversation, the panels are solid. Hank Green’s Ask Hank Anything Live is a masterclass from a YouTube veteran who can equally engage a live audience, including a prepared list of questions, researched answers, a crowd-pleaser pee experiment with syringes, and a demo of putting mayonnaise into an ice cream maker. It’s one of surprisingly few live demos on stage, which feels like a missed opportunity at a maker convention.
Later, attorney Tyler Chou helms a discussion about breaking the law in YouTube videos with ease and panache, using a meat tenderiser as a gavel while steering the YouTubers on her panel, who in turn shine under her guidance.
Beyond the panels, there’s plenty to enjoy around the exhibit halls, but it’s very difficult to experience any of it. The crowds are shoulder-to-shoulder most of the festival. Getting to do a demo or try some cool tech is possible in theory, but it feels bad to take up space when there’s a kid waiting. The exhibitors are the real stars of the show: insightful, interesting and enthusiastic about their projects—if you can get a word in. The Maker Faire half of the event might easily outclass the VidCon half, if only it is given room to breathe.
Unfortunately, the social media posts from previous years of doing egg drops and getting to control robots, a big selling point of Open Sauce, are not accurate in this iteration of the event. If there were half the number of people, the experience would be so much more interactive and fun, and I might actually get to try some of the activities on offer, of which there is a great selection and variety.
Additionally, it’s hard to find anything. The organisers dropped the ball with convention basics. There is no map posted online, and physical ones are not readily available on site. At one point, a staff member walks around with a map asking attendees to take photos of it because they don’t have any more copies.
There is also no list of exhibitors and their booths at the event, and exhibitors later claim not to have received their location assignment until the last minute. On site, there is no clear signage for each location, nor any specified themes for each exhibit hall that would help with wayfinding. And the stages do not have presenters or panel information posted anywhere nearby.
By Saturday afternoon, an attendee has made an online map for the event, complete with a searchable list of exhibitors, and shares it to Reddit. Through the whole weekend, organisers never bother to put up even a PDF of their printed map on their website and eventually direct attendees to download the Hacker Tracker app for a schedule (difficult when the festival site has no public Wi-Fi), as if to say, “never mind if we don’t make a map, I’m sure one of our audience will do it for us, for free.”
The crowds and the heat are overwhelming, and there are no designated quiet spaces for General Admission attendees to decompress. Accessibility in general could be much better. At the main stage, wheelchair users have to go around the front and squeeze into a difficult spot between chairs, while other attendees stand up to make room in the middle of a panel. The outdoor stage, on grass, must be even trickier to navigate with any sort of mobility aid. And I never see any closed captions or ASL interpreters.
Food is available via a selection of food trucks that are scattered across the outdoor area of the San Mateo County Event Center. They are average in quality and expensive in price. $18 for chicken strips and fries. $9 for a hot dog. $16-$18 for burgers. Open Sauce doesn’t allow attendees to bring in outside food, which is frustrating, especially if you have any dietary restrictions or medical conditions. Lines for the food trucks can be up to an hour, and often block walking paths. Bringing in a snack should be allowed so attendees can enjoy the event, instead of spending valuable time waiting in a line for overpriced food and drink so they don’t faint in the California heat.
Near the entrance is the badge soldering station, a tent where you can solder your circuit board event badge. I check on the line multiple times during the event, and it is always at least an hour’s wait. A volunteer tells me they won’t give me the kit to solder the badge at home, unless I wait in the line, so I decline. The line for the merch tent is similarly long, though there are no 2026-specific t-shirts. Attendees who paid for higher-tier badges that included a merch pack of “over $75 value” receive just a canvas tote bag and a poster.
There are so many issues from purely an event perspective that point to Open Sauce’s fatal flaw: it’s growing way too fast. It’s chasing big sponsors like GM, who this year takes up a large branded section of the main exhibit hall. It’s adding pricier new ticket types while removing value like the creator sessions. It’s selling out of tickets and packing the Event Center to the brim, with a $120 Sunday ticket added a few days before the event. Growth is prioritised over quality, and more tellingly, the creators’ experience is prioritised over the attendees’.
Who is Open Sauce for?
The final panel on the main stage at 5:20pm on Sunday is titled “William Osman’s Big Surprise: What will it be? Does it exist? Only one way to find out.” When Osman arrives on stage, he says, “This panel was put on the schedule as a joke, there is no big surprise.” It feels like a joke at the expense of the audience: some of whom, who have clearly stayed for this moment, get up and leave. Osman says that the price of tickets will be going up next year, and there’s an early bird sale. And then he wonders aloud how he’s going to occupy the rest of the allotted 20 minutes.
No matter, Osman and Michael Reeves (who has been sampling hot sauce while Osman speaks) are joined on stage by Kevin and Allen Pan, and soon, the panel becomes a meet-and-greet. It’s the first time fans go up to the barrier as Osman calls out people individually to name exhibits they enjoyed. Someone asks for the hot sauce to sell on eBay, and Osman obliges, passing the bottles down through the crowd. It’s noisy and wild as people clamour for Kevin’s autograph and try to get selfies with Pan.
Staff photographers capture the moment: a throng of fans at the barricade, screaming for the YouTubers. This will certainly be the marketing image for next year’s Open Sauce, though it’s hardly representative of the event as a whole, when the big-name creators have been so keen to be so separate from their audience.
From the four on stage, beaming in the attention, it’s clear who Open Sauce is for. On Friday, there was a full day of panels and breakout sessions for Industry badge holders ($834.15) that ended with a networking reception and VIP preview party. It’s hardly affordable for anyone just starting out on YouTube, but for the mid to big creators who can write it off as a business expense (or better yet, get invited for free as a guest or speaker), it’s a chance to hang out with friends in the business and make valuable connections.
Open Sauce is one big party for them, paid for by the rest of us.
