events
Eventbrite vs Ticket Tailor vs Direct Ticketing: The Real Cost for Organisers
Ticketing fees have one brilliant psychological trick: make the customer pay them and suddenly everyone pretends they are not costing the organiser anything.
By Lewie Allen ·
Ticketing fees have one brilliant psychological trick.
Make the customer pay them and suddenly everyone pretends they are not costing the organiser anything.
Of course they are.
If somebody buys your £30 ticket and has to pay £32.50 or £33 by the time they reach checkout, your event costs them £32.50 or £33.
Calling the difference a "booking fee" does not change the economics.
And when independent events are fighting for every conversion, that distinction matters.
Start with a £30 ticket
Eventbrite's UK pricing has historically combined percentage-based ticketing charges with a fixed per-ticket amount, with payment processing wrapped into the overall proposition.
The exact fee structure can change, so organisers should always check the current pricing page before modelling an event.
But the underlying point remains:
percentage-based pricing scales with the value of your ticket.
That means a £100 ticket generates substantially more fee revenue for the platform than a £20 ticket, even though much of the underlying software work is broadly similar.
The order is created.
The attendee details are stored.
The confirmation is sent.
A barcode or ticket is issued.
The ticket is checked at the door.
The platform has absolutely created value.
The uncomfortable question is how closely the price of that value should track the face value of your ticket.
Ticket Tailor takes a different approach
Ticket Tailor has built much of its positioning around a more transparent per-ticket model, while payment processing can sit separately with providers such as Stripe, PayPal or Square.
That creates an important distinction:
ticketing software cost and payment processing cost are visible as separate things.
I think that is healthier.
Payment processing genuinely carries costs and risks that scale with transaction value.
Card networks charge.
Fraud risk changes.
Refund exposure changes.
Payment providers have infrastructure and compliance obligations.
But the ticketing software itself has not necessarily worked five times harder because you decided to sell VIP tickets for £100 rather than general admission for £20.
Why should software get dramatically more expensive because your ticket does?
Suppose two organisers each sell 500 tickets.
One charges £15.
The other charges £100.
Both organisers need roughly the same core functions:
- checkout
- attendee records
- ticket generation
- email delivery
- scanning
- reporting
- refunds
- customer support tooling
Yet a percentage-based ticketing model can make the second event dramatically more valuable to the ticketing company.
There may be good commercial reasons for that model.
It is still worth interrogating.
For independent operators, percentage pricing can quietly turn a relatively modest technology cost into one of the larger line items around the event.
Especially when the organiser generated the customer themselves.
Then there is direct ticketing
The logical extreme is to own the checkout yourself and pay primarily for the underlying infrastructure and payment processing.
That can materially change the economics.
Stripe, for example, publishes straightforward transaction pricing for UK cards. A direct stack may therefore leave more of the ticket value with the organiser than a marketplace-style all-in-one fee.
But direct is not automatically better.
You now own more responsibility.
Refunds.
Customer support.
Fraud.
Email delivery.
Checkout reliability.
Ticket generation.
Analytics.
Tax configuration.
Door operations.
Potential payment-compliance considerations depending on how you build it.
Cheap software that fails while 500 people are trying to enter a venue is extremely expensive software.
Eventbrite offers something direct ticketing does not
This comparison becomes dishonest if we ignore Eventbrite's biggest strength:
distribution.
Eventbrite is not merely a checkout engine.
It is a marketplace.
People browse it looking for things to do.
That has genuine value.
A ticket page sitting on your own website does not magically generate an audience.
So the real comparison is not:
Which ticketing platform is cheapest?
It is:
What exactly am I paying this platform to do?
If Eventbrite generates 150 customers who would never otherwise have discovered your event, paying more may make perfect sense.
If you brought all 500 customers yourself through Instagram, WhatsApp, your mailing list, an existing membership base or your own community, marketplace economics become harder to justify.
Discovery and infrastructure are different jobs
I think the industry often bundles two separate things together:
discovery and event infrastructure.
Discovery platforms are useful.
Ticketing infrastructure is useful.
They do not necessarily have to be the same company.
An organiser should be able to list an event wherever their audience discovers events while still owning the operational stack around checkout, access, membership and customer relationships.
That is one of the ideas behind Croa's architecture.
The system running your event does not necessarily need to be the marketplace that discovered the customer.
Those are fundamentally different jobs.
The real cost is not just the fee
There is another cost organisers rarely put in the spreadsheet:
dependency.
If your audience lives primarily inside another platform, your ability to launch the next event depends on that platform continuing to give you access to them.
If all customer communications, discovery, checkout and ticket delivery happen somewhere else, the platform becomes increasingly important to the relationship.
That may be worth it.
But it should be a conscious trade.
What should organisers ask?
Before choosing a ticketing platform, I would ask five questions:
- How much does it cost at my actual ticket price?
- Who brought the customer — me or the platform?
- What customer data and permissions do I retain?
- Can I use another discovery platform without changing my operational stack?
- What happens if I want to leave?
The cheapest ticketing platform is not necessarily the best.
The most expensive is not necessarily the worst.
But organisers should stop treating fees as invisible simply because the customer sees them on the final checkout screen.
Somebody always pays.