White-label ticketing for independent venues

Your ticket money goes straight to your bank. It never sits in ours.

Gatehouse is a real box office that runs on your own domain, under your own name, through your own Stripe account. You set the service fee and you keep all of it. We charge $1 a ticket and $49.99 a month, or $449.99 for the year, and that is the entire price list.

Start selling See what it costs

Paid on your schedule: Money lands in your Stripe balance when the card clears and moves on your normal payout schedule. Not three days after the show.
Your fee, your revenue: You set the service fee. It is yours. We are a flat dollar, and the buyer never sees our name.
No marketplace: There is nowhere here to advertise a competitor's Friday to the audience you spent ten years building.
One honest price: The all-in total is the first number a buyer sees, which the FTC has required of ticket sellers since May 2025.

The part nobody prints

Whoever owns the checkout owns the customer.

Every ticketing company will tell you the audience is yours. Then read the part underneath. On most platforms the company is the merchant of record: their name is on your customer’s card statement, the money arrives in their account, and it reaches yours some days after the show has already happened. Several of them also run a public events marketplace stocked with their clients’ shows. Which is to say, with your show, listed beside the one down the road.

None of that is a scandal. It is a different business from the one you thought you were buying. They are building an audience. You are the supply.

Gatehouse is built the other way around, and not as a value. As plumbing.

01
The fan’s card
Stripe Checkout, opened from your page, on your domain, showing one all-in total.
02
Your Stripe account
A direct charge on the account in your business’s name. You are the merchant of record: your name on the statement, your tax position, your relationship with the buyer.
03
Your bank
On whatever payout schedule you and Stripe have agreed. We are not in that sentence, because we are not in that path.

Stripe splits our dollar off as each charge settles, the way an app store takes its cut. We never hold a balance of yours, so there is nothing for us to release, delay, reserve or freeze. That is not a policy we could change on a bad quarter. It is the shape of the integration.

What actually goes wrong

Three problems, in the order they ruin your week.

The money arrives after you have already spent it.

You paid the band’s deposit in June. You pay the sound engineer and the bar staff on the night. The tickets sold in July. On most platforms that money is released three business days after the show ends and takes another three to five to reach your bank, which means the sale you made thirty days early lands thirty-three days late.

You financed somebody else’s float with your own box office. On Gatehouse there is no float, because the money was never pooled: it is in your Stripe balance when the card clears.

The fee is charged in your name and resented in your name.

Your regulars do not see a line item called Eventbrite. They see that your $35 show costs $39.19, and they mention it at the bar. You carry the reputational cost of a fee you did not set and do not keep.

Here it is your fee. You choose the number, it is disclosed to the buyer inside one all-in price, and it is your revenue. If you would rather it were zero, set it to zero: the checkout absorbs it and the buyer pays face value.

Your event page is working for somebody else.

A marketplace has to be useful to buyers, and useful to a buyer means showing them other shows. So the page you send your mailing list to becomes a place where a competitor’s Friday is advertised to an audience you spent ten years building.

We cannot do this to you. There is no marketplace in this product, no discovery feed, no events-near-you. There is your calendar, on your domain, with nothing else on it.

Pricing

$1 a ticket. $49.99 a month. No percentage.

Nobody at the professional end of this industry publishes a price. Ask Tixr, Etix, AudienceView or Ticketmaster what they charge and you get a calendar invite. We would rather you worked out what we cost before you talk to anybody, including whether we are worth it.

Monthly

$49.99a month

Started and canceled from the same page, with no notice period and nothing to sign. Use it for a season and decide then.

Yearly

Save 25%

$449.99a year

$37.50 a month, paid once. Twelve monthly payments of $49.99 would be $599.88, so this keeps $149.89 in the building: three months of the year for nothing.

Either way it is $1 a paid ticket, free tickets and comps cost nothing, and there is no percentage of anything. The calculator below uses the monthly price, which is the worse of the two for you: on the yearly plan every figure it produces improves by $12.49 a month.

Free tickets cost nothing. Comps cost nothing. Invoicing a venue for giving a seat away is not a business model.
No percentage of face value, so a $95 ticket costs exactly as much to sell as a $15 one.
Your own domain is included, not an add-on at $150 a year.
No contract, no exclusivity clause, no minimum, no setup fee, no charge for a box office terminal.
Every feature on every account. There is no tier where the good scanner lives.
Card processing is Stripe’s, billed to you by Stripe at whatever rate you have with them. We do not mark it up, because it never passes through us.

Your ticket price$35.00

What you charge before any fee

Tickets a month400

Across every show you put on

At that rate, on Gatehouse instead

$650more a month

$7,800a year, after everything

After the $49.99 subscription, with the fan paying exactly the same $39.19 either way. Or leave the money where it is and cut $1.80 off every ticket instead: you would bank what you bank now, and your regulars would notice.

Eventbrite

The fan pays: $39.19
Service fee, theirs to keep: − $3.09
Card processing: − $1.10
Reaches the venue: $35.00

Three business days after the show ends, then three to five more to your bank.

Gatehouse

The fan pays: $39.19
Card processing, Stripe direct: − $1.44
Gatehouse, per ticket: − $1.00
Reaches the venue: $36.75

$3.09 of that is the service fee you set, and it stays with you. Paid on your own Stripe payout schedule, because the money was never anywhere else.

Better off, per ticket+ $1.75

Eventbrite’s published organizer pricing as of 20 September 2026: 3.7% + $1.79 per ticket, plus 2.9% processing per order, service fee passed to the buyer. Stripe’s standard US card rate is 2.9% + 30¢. Every figure assumes a single-ticket order, which is the worst case for us: Stripe’s 30¢ is charged once per order, so a four-ticket order costs you seven and a half cents a ticket instead of thirty. Your own Stripe rate, your tax position and your refunds will move these numbers. Check the arithmetic against your last statement before you believe us.

Day of show

Ticketing is judged at the door, at 7:55.

Nobody changes platform because of a dashboard. They change because of a night: a queue down the sidewalk, a code that will not read, a comp nobody can find, a manager on the phone to a support line that closed at five. This is the part that was built first.

It works with no signal.

Rooms eat cell service, and a room filling with phones eats what is left. The scanner holds the whole night’s manifest in the browser’s own storage, marked persistent so it cannot be evicted, decides every scan locally, and syncs when there is something to sync to. A dead tower is not a queue on the sidewalk.

A screenshot gets in once.

Duplicate admission is refused by a unique index in the database, not by a check in the app that two phones can race past. The second scan of a code is a full-screen red, a buzz, and the name it was first used under.

Will-call carries no barcode.

A will-call order has no QR, no PDF and no wallet pass, so there is nothing to forward to a friend. They collect at the desk with ID, and the desk has a search box, a hand-over button and an undo.

Comps take a seat. The guest list does not.

A comp is a real ticket with a real barcode, modeled as fully discounted face value so settlement can answer what you gave away. The guest list is names, checked off in parts at the door, taking nothing off sale.

Holds are capacity, not tickets.

Production kills and artist holds come off sale without issuing anything, and go back in part, in full, or straight into comps when the tour releases them.

The pass follows the show.

Move or reschedule a date and the Apple and Google passes already sitting in people’s wallets change. A refunded ticket voids visibly and is refused at the door, online and off.

Afterwards the scans become a report: turnout, no-shows, refusals broken out on their own, and an arrival curve in fifteen-minute buckets. That last one is the number that decides two people on the door next time, or four.

Constraints, on purpose

Six things we have made ourselves unable to do.

Advertise another venue’s show to your buyers.: There is no marketplace to advertise it on. We did not build one, and adding one later would break the promise this company is for.
Market to your customers.: The only mail that leaves this system is the confirmation your buyer asked for and the notices they opted into: a transfer, a waitlist offer, a cancellation.
Hold your money.: It never arrives here, so there is no balance to reserve, release, delay or freeze, and no support ticket to open about one.
Take a percentage of a good night.: A sold-out Saturday at $95 costs you the same dollar a ticket as a Tuesday at $12.
Put our name anywhere a buyer can see it.: Not in the URL, not on the card statement, not in the subject line, not in the footer of the confirmation.
Lock you in.: No contract and no exclusivity clause. Leaving is one DNS record changed back, and the tickets already sold keep working, because they were always charges on your own account.

Switching

You are not moving your audience. You are moving where they buy.

The reason venues stay somewhere they dislike is almost never the fee. It is the fear of losing ten years of buyers, of losing the search ranking on the page everybody types in, and of a door crew who know one system and would have to learn another on a Friday. All three are answerable, so here are the answers.

Your domain, so your ranking is yours.

tickets.yourvenue.com is a name you own and keep. It does not reset when you move, it does not belong to us, and the link somebody bookmarked in 2019 still points at your building.

Run both for a season.

Nothing here is exclusive. Put two shows through Gatehouse, leave the rest where they are, and decide in three months with real numbers instead of a demo.

Take your list with you first.

Export your past buyers from wherever you are now before you do anything else. If that turns out to be difficult, you have learned something useful about who they think the audience belongs to.

The door takes an afternoon.

One run-through on scanning and will-call. It is a web page on the phone already in their pocket, it works with the internet off, and a volunteer who has read one printed page can run it.

Setup

One DNS record and your colors.

There is no plugin to install, no script tag to paste into a theme you are frightened of, and no developer to book. Your website keeps doing exactly what it does now. One link on it points somewhere new.

1
Connect Stripe
Stripe’s own form, hosted by Stripe. They collect the tax and identity details we have no business holding and hand back an account id. We never see a bank number. Approval is theirs to give, and the page says so rather than pretending you are live when you are not.
2
Subscribe
$49.99 a month or $449.99 for the year, started and canceled from the same page. A failed card does not stop an onsale the next morning: there is a grace window, because the people punished by an instant cut-off would be buyers who have no idea a subscription exists.
3
Point a name at us
One CNAME at your DNS provider, left un-proxied. The certificate issues itself once the record is visible, usually in minutes.
4
Set your colors
A primary, a background, a surface, a text color and a logo. Every brand is checked against the text that will sit on it and quietly corrected if it would be unreadable, so nobody ships a red that fails contrast on their own error messages.

The whole integration

TYPE	NAME	VALUE
CNAME	tickets	saas.gatehouse.app

Leave it un-proxied. Your provider’s default is right, and the proxying happens on our side.

That is the integration. If it costs you an afternoon, most of the afternoon was Stripe asking who you are, which is a question we would rather they asked than us.

Built already

The unglamorous half, which is most of it.

Selling

Calendar grouped by month, full-bleed event pages
All-in pricing on every surface, fees disclosed inside it
Atomic inventory holds with a ten-minute countdown
Accessible seating flags, low stock, not-yet-on-sale states
Per-person limits counted across every order, not one basket
Waitlists that ration offers to the seats that actually exist
Promo codes: percentage, fixed, access-only, tier-scoped
Presales as hidden tiers unlocked by a code

Delivery

Confirmation email with an inline QR per ticket
Two-page-per-ticket PDF attached
Apple Wallet passes with a live update service
Google Wallet passes with save links
Passwordless order lookup by link
Transfers that void the original and issue a new code
Refunded tickets void the pass visibly

The door

Camera scanning that works on iOS Safari
Offline manifest in persistent local storage
Duplicate detection enforced in the database
Color, tone and haptic feedback; manual entry fallback
Guest list tab beside the camera
Will-call pickup desk with search and undo

Money

Settlement per event or period, derived from orders
A self-check that refuses to look authoritative when it cannot balance
Refunds on any subset of an order, seat by seat
Exchanges between tiers, inventory moved atomically
Estimated processing cost, including what Stripe keeps on a refund
Admissions-tax figures on a sale-date or event-date basis
CSV export: settlement, refund register, per-tier

Staff

Four roles enforced on pages, on APIs, and in what renders
Database-backed sessions, revocable per person
Account lockout, scrypt at OWASP cost, forced password replacement
Audit log on every fulfillment, email and refund
A queue page showing what is pending, retrying and buried

Straight answers

The questions worth asking any ticketing company.

Who is the merchant of record?

You are, and we are not going to pretend that is free. Your business name is on the buyer’s card statement, the charge sits on your Stripe account, your tax position applies, and a chargeback lands with you rather than with us. That is the trade: the reason nobody can hold your money is the same reason the dispute is yours. Stripe bills you directly and carries your own balance, which is the arrangement that makes everything else on this page true.

What happens if we want to leave?

You change one DNS record back. There is no contract to run out, no exclusivity clause, and no notice period. Tickets already sold keep working and keep scanning, because they were always charges on your own Stripe account and passes issued in your name.

Do you take a cut of bar, merchandise or donations?

No. We see paid tickets and nothing else, and we take a dollar of each. What happens at the bar is none of our business, in the literal sense.

What happens when the internet dies at the door?

The scanner downloaded the night before you opened the doors. It carries on deciding locally, records what it admitted, refuses duplicates, and syncs when there is something to sync to. This is the ordinary case in a basement room, not the emergency case.

Do you email or sell to our buyers?

No, and there is nowhere for us to do it from. No marketplace, no discovery feed, no newsletter, no recommendations. The only mail that leaves this system is the buyer’s own confirmation and the notices they asked for.

Is the all-in pricing optional?

No. The Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees has applied to live-event ticket sellers since 12 May 2025, and here it is a property of the code rather than a setting somebody can forget: the total including every mandatory fee is the number the listing renders first, and the breakdown may be shown but never larger and never before it.

What size room is this for?

Roughly thirty tickets a month and up, which is where the subscription starts paying for itself; drag the slider above and it will tell you where your own line is. Above a few thousand tickets a month a flat dollar stops being the right shape, and we would rather have that conversation than let you overpay quietly.

Who answers when something goes wrong at 8pm?

A person, and it is a small company, so it is usually the person who wrote the thing you are asking about. We are not going to claim a 24/7 follow-the-sun operation we do not have. What we will claim is that nobody here is going to tell you your payout is under review.

Put your name back on your own box office.

Making the account takes about a minute and asks for no card. You get a ticketing address that works immediately, and you can build the whole calendar on it before you decide anything. Connecting Stripe is the only part that waits on somebody else.

Open a box office Work out the numbers first

No demo gate, no discovery call before a price, and nobody from sales will ring your venue on a Saturday. If you would rather ask something first, hello@gatehouse.app reaches a person.