Subscription or commission for tickets: which is cheaper?

You're putting your tickets online and you have a choice: a platform that takes a commission on every ticket sold, or a platform with a fixed subscription per month or per year. A commission feels safe — sell nothing, pay nothing. A subscription feels like a fixed cost you have no matter what. Which of the two is cheaper for you? It comes down to one number: how many paid tickets you sell in a year.

How does a commission work?

The platform keeps something from every sale: a percentage of the ticket price, a fixed amount per ticket, or both. The cost grows with your success. Sell twice as much and you pay twice as much — even though the platform does nothing extra for it.

Often that commission doesn't come out of your own revenue but is added to the price as a service fee for the buyer. It looks free to you, but your visitor pays more than what's on your poster. What that does to your sales, you can read in Passing the ticket fee on to the buyer.

How does a subscription work?

You pay a fixed amount for the software, per month or per year. Whether you sell a hundred tickets or ten thousand, the bill stays the same. Your ticket price is the price your visitor pays, and the revenue goes to you in full — apart from the cost of your payment provider, which you have in every model.

The break-even point: from how many tickets is a subscription cheaper?

Take a made-up platform that charges 3 percent plus 50 cents per ticket. On a 12-euro ticket, that's 86 cents per ticket sold. Over a whole year:

Now put a fixed amount next to it. At Passavo, the Start plan costs €90.00 a year, for up to 3,000 paid tickets. The Growth plan costs €290.00 a year, with no ceiling on the number of tickets.

You can work out the break-even point in one step: divide the yearly price of the subscription by what you'd give up in commission per ticket. The result is the number of tickets a year from which the subscription is cheaper. Everything you sell above that is yours.

Want the real rates of existing platforms, with the source and the date we checked them? They're in our comparisons.

When is a commission the better deal?

To be fair: a commission is cheaper if you sell very little and only organise something now and then. A brass band with one concert of sixty seats would rather pay nothing than a yearly subscription.

For that case, it doesn't have to be a commission. On the free plan you sell up to 100 paid tickets per event, with no limit on the number of events and no card details needed to start. Three fundraising dinners of a hundred seats each then cost you nothing. If one busy evening goes over that, you pay for that single event for €19.00, up to 2 times a year.

A second argument for a commission: some platforms bring in new buyers through their own website. That can be worth part of the commission. If you mainly sell to your own members, regular visitors and followers, you're paying for something you hardly use.

And if you only sell a few months a year?

Then a monthly subscription you can put on hold is the middle ground. A paid monthly plan can be paused in your quiet months: you get no invoices, your data stays in place and you carry on on the free plan. A yearly subscription can't be paused, but there you already pay ten months instead of twelve.

Don't forget the payment provider

In both models, an online payment costs something at the payment provider. With some platforms that cost is included in the commission, with others it comes on top. At Passavo you connect your own Mollie or Stripe account: the money goes straight to your bank account and we keep nothing of it. How that works is explained in Payouts and fees.

Decide in three steps

1. Count last year's paid tickets and note your average ticket price.
2. Work out what you'd give up in commission per ticket, and multiply by your number of tickets.
3. Compare that with the yearly price of a plan on our pricing page, or with the free plan if your events stay small.

For more on the difference between the two models, read ticketing without commission and An alternative to ticketing platforms with per-ticket fees.