Simple ticketing: what it takes to get an onsale live

What people mean by simple

Nobody searching for simple ticketing software wants a product with less in it. They want to not spend three weeks on procurement to sell eighty tickets to a Thursday.

Unpacked, “simple” is usually four specific things:

• No gate before the price. A published number, on a page, without a form.
• No sales call before the product. Sign up and use it, rather than book a slot and wait four days.
• No contract to have read. Nothing that needs a lawyer before the first show.
• Short time to first onsale. The actual measure. Everything else is a proxy for it.

Worth separating from a fifth thing that often gets bundled in: simple to set up and simple to run every week are different properties, and they trade off. A tool with no concept of holds is simpler on day one and costs you twenty minutes a show forever.

Three routes to a live onsale

Route one: a payment link

A Stripe or Square payment link, posted on Instagram, with a list of who paid. Live in about ten minutes and genuinely the right answer for a one-off.

What it is not: it does not stop you overselling, there is no ticket to scan so the door is a laptop and a name search, and you cannot meaningfully refund part of an order or move somebody to another date. Fine for eighty people who all know you. Not fine for a calendar.

Route two: a marketplace listing

Eventbrite or similar. Live in under an hour, no fixed cost, and the platform brings some audience of its own.

The cost is structural rather than monetary. Your event lives at their address, your buyers are on their list, the fee is a percentage of your ticket price, and the page showing your Friday can show somebody else’s Saturday. That is the deal, and for an annual event it is often a perfectly good deal.

Route three: your own box office

Ticketing on your own domain, charges on your own processor account. Historically this was the slow, expensive option, which is why most small venues never considered it. That has changed: the setup is now a DNS record and a Stripe onboarding form.

What each route costs, and what it costs later

The honest summary: route one is right for one event, route two is right for an irregular calendar or when you actively want the marketplace’s reach, route three is right once you are running a schedule and the percentage has started to hurt. The break-even arithmetic for that last transition is here.

The actual steps, with the actual hours

For route three, the part that is genuinely unavoidable and the part that is not.

• Make the account. About a minute. It should not ask for a card, because you have not decided anything yet.
• Build the calendar. An hour or two for a season, most of it writing descriptions and cropping posters. This can all happen before any money or DNS is involved, which matters: you should be able to see your own shows on your own page before committing.
• Connect the payment processor. Stripe’s own onboarding form: business details, identity, bank account. Twenty minutes of typing. Then a wait, which is the one step nobody controls, because Stripe verifies on their own schedule and can ask for a document later.
• Point the domain. One CNAME record at your DNS provider, un-proxied. Five minutes plus propagation.
• Set the colours. Ten minutes. Should be a colour and a logo, not a theme editor.
• Brief the door. One run-through on scanning and will-call, maybe twenty minutes, and it should be a web page on the phone they already have rather than an app to install.

Total: an afternoon of your time, plus however long your processor takes to verify you. Anybody promising a live onsale in five minutes is not counting the payment processor, and the payment processor is not something a ticketing company can hurry.

One rule that is not optional any more

Since 12 May 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees has required live-event ticket sellers to display the total price including every mandatory fee up front, more prominently than any breakdown of it. Civil penalties attach per violation.

In practice this kills the pattern where a $30 ticket becomes $38.42 at the last screen. When you evaluate a product, check whether all-in pricing is a property of the system or a checkbox somebody can forget, because the liability is yours as the seller and not the platform’s.

Setting up Gatehouse

Four steps, in this order, and the third is the only one that waits on anybody else.

• Open the account. About a minute, no card. You get a ticketing address that works immediately.
• Build the calendar on it. Shows, tiers, posters, on-sale dates. All of this works before you have connected anything, so you can decide with your own season in front of you.
• Connect Stripe. Their form, their verification. We never see the tax and identity details, and you get a real Stripe dashboard for your own business at the end of it.
• Point your domain. One un-proxied CNAME, and the certificate is issued for you.

$1.00 a paid ticket, $49.99 a month or $449.99 a year. No contract, so the fastest way to evaluate it is to put two shows through it and leave the rest where they are.

What is deliberately not in it

Simple is a set of decisions about what to leave out, so here is what we left out, in case one of them is the thing you need.

• No reserved seating or seat maps. General admission and tiers only.
• No marketplace or discovery feed. We will not bring you an audience. Nobody can advertise a competing show to your buyers either, which is the other side of the same decision.
• No email marketing tools. The only mail that leaves the system is the buyer’s own confirmation and notices they opted into. Export your list and use a tool built for it.
• No feature tiers. Two plans, differing only in how often you are billed. There is no upgrade that unlocks the good scanner.
• No 24/7 phone support. It is a small company. You get a person, usually the one who wrote the thing you are asking about, and not a follow-the-sun operation we do not have.

Sources

• Federal Trade Commission, Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, effective 12 May 2025: ftc.gov business guidance
• Stripe standard US online card rate, 2.9% + $0.30, and their hosted onboarding for connected accounts.