Affordable ticketing software, and the volume where each model wins

“Cheap” is not a property of a platform

It is a property of a platform and your volume and your ticket price, and any page that names a cheapest without asking you those two numbers is selling something.

A percentage fee is cheapest at low volume and punishing at high ticket prices. A flat per-ticket fee is the reverse. A subscription is the worst option available until the moment it is the best one, and the crossover is a number you can calculate. The rest of this page is that calculation.

Three models, and who each one suits

Percentage plus flat, per ticket

Eventbrite, Prekindle, and most bundled platforms. Costs nothing when you sell nothing, which is genuinely valuable for an organiser running one event a year. Scales badly: the fee grows with your ticket price for no additional work, so success is taxed. Suits low volume, irregular events, and anybody who values a zero fixed cost above everything else.

Flat per ticket, no subscription

Ticket Tailor. Predictable, indifferent to your ticket price, and still zero when you sell nothing. This is the cheapest model available to a small venue and there is no honest way to argue otherwise.

Flat per ticket plus a subscription

Gatehouse. Worse than the above until volume covers the fixed cost, then flat forever regardless of what you charge. The subscription is what pays for the parts that cost money to run whether or not you sold anything this month: a custom domain, wallet pass update services, the door infrastructure. Suits a room with a regular calendar.

The rates, dated and sourced

For the three that publish nothing, no comparison is possible and none is offered here. The most citable public figure for the primary market remains the US Government Accountability Office’s 2018 study, which found fees averaging 27% of the ticket price across the sample it examined, ranging from 20% to 56%. That study is old and its sample was explicitly not generalisable, which is exactly why it should be quoted with those qualifications rather than rounded up into a headline.

Three worked examples

A $12 door, a $35 headline, and a $95 seated-capacity night, each a single-ticket order, each holding the buyer’s total constant.

Ticket Tailor keeps 15 cents a ticket more than we do, at every price, and has no subscription. Both of us leave a percentage platform well behind once the ticket price rises, and the gap is entirely the percentage.

The break-even table, including ours

The subscription is a fixed cost, so there is a volume below which we are more expensive than Eventbrite. Here it is, per ticket price. Below the line in the right-hand column, do not buy us.

Six costs that are not on the pricing page

• Fees on free tickets and comps. Some platforms charge per ticket issued rather than per ticket sold. If you comp forty for a record release, that is a line item.
• The custom domain as an add-on. Commonly $100 to $200 a year for a CNAME and a certificate, both of which are free to provision.
• Per-scanner or per-terminal charges. Ask what four door staff on four phones costs.
• Payout delay as a financing cost. Money held until after the show is money you are lending interest-free to your ticketing platform. On a room doing $40,000 a month, a two-week delay is a real working capital position.
• Marked-up processing. If the platform is the merchant of record, you cannot see the processor’s actual rate, and the spread between it and what you are charged is invisible revenue.
• The cost of leaving. Contract term, notice period, and whether your URLs were ever yours. This one is zero right up to the day it is enormous.

When Gatehouse is the wrong choice

• Under roughly thirty paid tickets a month. The tables above say so. Use a no-fixed-cost platform until you are past it.
• If the absolute lowest fee is the only criterion. Ticket Tailor, on the numbers above.
• If you need reserved seating. We do general admission and tiers. No seat maps.
• If you want a marketplace to find you an audience. We deliberately do not have one, and a platform without discovery cannot sell you discovery.
• If you want somebody else to own chargebacks. You are the merchant of record here. That is the same fact as nobody being able to hold your money, seen from the other side.

When it is the right one

A room with a regular calendar, thirty or more paid tickets a month, general admission, that would rather own the domain, the buyer list and the payout timing than rent them. At that point the subscription is covered several times over by the percentage you are no longer paying, and the parts that are not about money, which is most of them, start being the reason.

$1.00 a paid ticket. $49.99 a month or $449.99 a year. No percentage, no fee on a comp, no contract, no exclusivity, every feature on every account. The calculator on the pricing page will take your own ticket price and volume and tell you where your line falls, including when it tells you not to.

Sources

• Eventbrite organiser pricing, read 20 September 2026: eventbrite.com/organizer/pricing
• Ticket Tailor pricing, USD view, read 20 September 2026: tickettailor.com/pricing
• Prekindle pricing, read 20 September 2026: prekindle.com/pricing
• US Government Accountability Office, “Event Ticket Sales”, GAO-18-347, April 2018: gao.gov/products/gao-18-347
• Gatehouse figures computed from the same pricing module the checkout uses, and asserted by an automated test on every change.