Manufacturing · McCormick Place, Chicago, IL · Sep 14-19, 2026

IMTS 2026lead capture

The honest read on IMTS 2026: what the organizer scanner really costs, what the badge encodes, and whether the venue WiFi holds up. Tendro is a lead capture app: your booth team scans badges and business cards with their phones, and it is $499 flat for the whole team at one event. One $499 fee covers every phone on your booth staff, instead of renting scanners per device.

Start free trial See the cost breakdown

Test the free desk trial: point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards and judge the enrichment yourself. No credit card.

IMTS 2026 fact sheet

Organizer scanner rental

$249–$735

per device or package, the public order forms we have collected; XPress Leads quotes behind the exhibitor login

Free WiFi, not in booths

768 Kbps

McCormick Place: meeting rooms, public space and hall hotspots only

Show days · order clock

Sep 14-19, 2026

McCormick Place, Chicago, IL. The rate schedule sits behind the exhibitor login.

Tendro (our line in this table)

$499 flat

whole booth team, one event, any badge from their phones

The basics

IMTS 2026 at a glance

Machining and industrial buyers fill this floor.

Show dates	September 14-19, 2026
Venue	McCormick Place, Chicago, IL
Lead retrieval	Registration by Maritz. Lead retrieval by CDS XPress Leads.
Who exhibits	Manufacturing

The scanner cost

What does lead retrieval cost at IMTS 2026?

Lead retrieval at IMTS 2026 runs through XPress Leads, priced behind the exhibitor login. The public order forms we have collected run $249 to $735 per device or package.

CDS XPress Leads does not publish the IMTS 2026 price sheet. It sits behind the IMTS exhibitor e-Kit login. For scale only: the public lead-retrieval order forms we have collected run $249 to $735 per device or package. We do not quote a show-specific number or rate schedule the vendor has not published.

Ordered through the IMTS exhibitor e-Kit lead-retrieval form, or direct from CDS XPress Leads. No public price sheet. Source.

The badge

What does the IMTS 2026 badge actually encode?

The IMTS badge prints a barcode and QR that encode an opaque CDS registration ID. Only the XPress Leads scanner resolves it.

Tendro captures the lead by reading the printed face and enriching the rest. The encoded ID is a license plate: it means nothing without the CDS database behind it, so only the organizer's own scanner resolves it.

What Tendro reads is the printed face, the name, title, and company, and enrichment fills the verified email and firmographics the badge leaves off. Same for business cards and QR codes. No universal app, Tendro included, decodes the organizer's encoded badge ID.

So the honest limit carries its own fix: without the organizer's licensed access (the rented scanner or a paid event API) no app resolves the encoded ID, and OCR plus enrichment returns the named, verified contact without waiting on the rental. The universal badge scanner explainer walks through how.

One more thing worth checking: exhibitor contracts vary on third-party capture policies, so read yours before the show.

The WiFi

Does the WiFi hold up at McCormick Place?

McCormick Place's own exhibitor WiFi guidance limits complimentary 768 Kbps WiFi to meeting rooms, public spaces and a few hall hotspots; booths need a paid line.

McCormick Place offers complimentary WiFi at 768 Kbps in meeting rooms and public spaces, plus the permanent food-pod areas and one hotspot per exhibit hall, and says access can be sporadic. It is not booth coverage, and an organizer WiFi buyout can change the terms, so booths that need a connection order paid service. Its wireless internet page has the details.

It gets worse under load. Show-floor WiFi is half-duplex, and per Cisco's high-density WiFi design guidance, a single access point degrades past roughly 25 clients per radio. The busiest hour on the floor is the hour the signal is thinnest.

Tendro captures to the phone first. Every scan queues locally with its real timestamp and syncs in order when the connection returns, so a soft WiFi bar never costs you a lead. The offline capture write-up covers how the queue behaves when the venue drops.

The alternative

What is the $499-per-event alternative?

Tendro is $499 per event with unlimited team members, never per device. A five-person booth pays one flat fee, not five rentals.

IMTS is a machining and industrial-metalworking floor, and its badge carries both a barcode and a QR of the same opaque CDS registration ID, so a rep who grabs the wrong symbology still lands on the identical number. Tendro reads the printed face either way and enriches the verified email off the name, title, and company.

One fee, not per device.$499 covers the whole booth. Unlimited devices, unlimited scans. A five-person team is one rental, not five.

Volume discounts from 10+ events.Running the year? From 10+ events a flat per-event rate drops as you add events.

Any CRM with a public API.Salesforce, HubSpot, or any CRM with a public API. Sync starts with your first paid event, under 10 seconds scan to record.

Start free trial The hidden cost of organizer scanners

The desk trial

How do you test it before IMTS 2026?

Run the free desk test before IMTS 2026: scan old badges and business cards, judge the enrichment, then decide.

The free trial is the scan-and-enrichment desk test. Point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards, watch what Tendro reads and enriches, and grade the data before IMTS 2026 opens.

We do not publish a blanket enrichment match rate. Industrial badges enrich differently than SaaS ones, which is exactly why the desk test exists: run it on your own badge stack.

The free trial covers capture and enrichment; CRM sync switches on with your first paid event, so you test field mapping against a real show, not a sandbox. The desk test costs a lunch break and answers the enrichment question before any show is on the line.

Straight answers