What It Actually Costs to Sell Tickets Online

It is the first question every organiser asks and the hardest one to get a straight answer to. You look at a ticketing platform’s pricing page, see a percentage, do a quick sum in your head, and then discover months later that the number you were actually charged bears very little relation to it.

The reason is that almost nobody charges one fee. They charge two or three, stacked, and the way they stack is what decides whether selling a cheap ticket is worth doing at all.

A ticketing fee is usually three fees

Pull apart any standard ticketing price list and you will find some combination of these:

• A percentage of the ticket price. The part everyone quotes. Usually the smallest of the three on a low-priced ticket.
• A fixed amount per ticket. A flat charge that does not care whether the ticket costs 5 or 500. This is the one that decides everything, and it is the one that gets mentioned second.
• A payment processing fee. Often charged per order rather than per ticket, and often quoted separately again, because the card network takes it rather than the platform.

Three numbers in three different shapes. That is why the percentage on the front of the page is not the answer to “what does this cost me”.

The fixed fee is the whole story

Here is the arithmetic that matters, and you can run it on any provider in about a minute.

Take a fee of 4% plus 1.50 per ticket, in whatever currency you sell in. That sounds modest. Now apply it at four different ticket prices and look at what you actually pay as a share of the ticket:

• A ticket at 5 - 0.20 plus 1.50 is 1.70. That is 34%.
• A ticket at 10 - 0.40 plus 1.50 is 1.90. That is 19%.
• A ticket at 25 - 1.00 plus 1.50 is 2.50. That is 10%.
• A ticket at 50 - 2.00 plus 1.50 is 3.50. That is 7%.

Same price list, and the effective rate moves between 7% and 34% depending only on what you charge at the door. Add payment processing on top and the cheap end gets worse again.

If you run a 5 or 10 ticket night - a weekly quiz, an open mic, a small club night, a workshop - a fixed per-ticket fee is not a rounding error. It is the single largest cost of selling the ticket, and it is invisible on the pricing page because the pricing page leads with the percentage.

Which means a flat percentage is not automatically cheaper

It would be convenient to say a flat percentage always wins. It does not, and it is worth knowing exactly where the line falls before you choose.

Against that same 4% plus 1.50, a flat 10% is cheaper on every ticket below 25, and more expensive on every ticket above it. The two are identical at 25. That is the whole comparison:

• Selling mostly cheap tickets? A flat percentage is dramatically better, because there is no fixed floor dragging the cheap end up.
• Selling mostly expensive tickets? A percentage-plus-fixed model is better, because the fixed part stops mattering and the percentage is lower.

So the honest question is not “which platform is cheapest”. It is “what does my average ticket actually cost, and which shape of fee suits that”. Work out your own average ticket price first. It takes two minutes and it answers the question properly.

Who pays, and why it is not a free choice

Most platforms let you either absorb the fee or add it to what the buyer pays at checkout. Both are legitimate and the trade-off is real.

Absorb it and your ticket price is the price, which converts better and looks honest, but comes out of your margin. Pass it on and you keep the full face value, but the buyer sees a number at checkout that is higher than the one on your poster, and a fee that looks large relative to a cheap ticket is exactly where people abandon a basket.

Notice that this is the fixed-fee problem again wearing a different hat. Adding 1.90 to a 10 ticket is a visible 19% surcharge at the moment of payment. Adding 1.00 to the same ticket is not.

Does “free” mean free

Most platforms charge nothing for free events, and it is worth checking that the version you are being offered really is nothing rather than nothing-plus-processing. If you run a mix of free and paid nights - most venues and community organisers do - this matters more than the headline rate, because it decides whether putting on a free event has a cost attached.

Five questions that get you a real number

Take these to any provider’s pricing page, including ours. They take about five minutes and they are the difference between a quoted rate and what lands in your account.

• Is there a fixed amount per ticket on top of the percentage? If yes, ask what it is and do the sum at your ticket price, not at 50.
• Is payment processing included or charged separately? And is it per order or per ticket? Per order is better for group bookings.
• What do free events cost? Including processing.
• Is there a monthly fee, a listing fee, or a minimum? And does any feature you need sit behind a higher tier.
• When do you actually get paid, and to whose account? Money that sits with the platform until after the event is a cashflow cost even when it is not a fee.

Published fees also differ by country and change without much fanfare, so check the provider’s own current page for the market you sell in rather than trusting a comparison table someone wrote a year ago. That includes this article.

What Tolivi charges

Ten percent a ticket. That is the whole price list.

No fixed amount per ticket, no monthly fee, no listing fee, no contract and no minimum. Free events cost nothing at all. You can absorb the 10% or pass it to the buyer, and payouts go to your own bank account rather than sitting with us.

On Business Premium it is 5%, which against that 4% plus 1.50 example stays cheaper all the way up to a 150 ticket. And for venues joining now, the founding offer halves the commission for the first year.

The rest of it comes with the price rather than a tier: ticket tiers and capacity, promo codes, a guest list that updates live, QR check-in at the door, and staffing for the night in the same place you sell it. Your guests do not need to download anything - they open your link, pay on the page, and the ticket arrives by email.

If you sell cheap tickets in volume, run the arithmetic above on what you use today. It is usually the fixed fee, not the percentage, that has been the problem.