Per-ticket fees
A per-ticket fee is the charge that grows precisely when your event goes well, which is what makes it hard to judge in advance.
A per-ticket fee is an amount taken for every ticket sold, charged as a fixed sum, as a percentage of the price, or as both together. It may be added to what the buyer pays or deducted from what you receive. Either way it scales with your success rather than with the work done.
Doing the sum properly
Take your last real season, not a hypothetical one. Multiply the tickets you actually sold by the fee, and add the percentage on the prices you actually charged. Your ticketing costs for the year are usually several times what the headline rate suggested.
Then check what happens at your best event rather than your average one. A per-ticket fee at a sell-out is the largest bill you will ever get from a ticketing platform, arriving in the same week as your best night.
The parts that are easy to miss
Read what free tickets cost, because several platforms charge for them, and an open day of eight hundred free places can produce a real invoice. Read what a refund costs, and what happens to the fee when one is issued.
Then look for anything described as free box office software or a free plan and check what the free tier actually excludes. Hidden fees are rarely hidden; they are usually published and simply not on the page you were reading.
Flat fee versus percentage: a worked example
Take a club running four events of two hundred tickets at €15: eight hundred tickets and €12,000 in turnover a year. Under a model of 3% plus €0.50 per ticket, each ticket costs €0.95, which comes to €760 a year. That model is an example, not the rate of an existing provider.
A subscription at €9.00 per month costs €108.00 a year when paid monthly, however many tickets are sold within the plan. The break-even point is where that yearly price equals what you would pay per ticket: in this example, around 114 tickets a year. Sell fewer and paying per ticket is cheaper; sell more and the subscription is.
Passing the ticket fee on to the buyer
Many platforms let you choose: you absorb the per-ticket fee yourself, or you pass it on to the buyer as a booking fee. Passing it on looks free, but the buyer sees a higher price on the final screen than on your poster, and that costs you sales.
With Passavo there is no ticket fee to pass on. If you want to cover your payment provider's costs, build them into your ticket price, which the buyer sees from the very first screen.
What Passavo charges per ticket
There is no per-ticket fee. You pay the flat monthly amount of your plan, and the plan sets how many paid tickets are included rather than what each ticket costs.
That makes the arithmetic dull, which is the point: your cost for the year is known before the season starts, and your best night is simply your best night rather than your largest bill.
Also searched for as
- ticket fees
- no per-ticket fee
- per-sale charges
- platform fees
Common questions
Do you charge anything for free tickets?
No. Free registrations are unlimited on every plan, including the free one, and they never generate a charge.
Does a refund cost us anything with you?
Not on our side. Your payment provider may keep its own transaction fee, which is set out in your agreement with them.
Which is cheaper: a flat fee or a percentage per ticket?
That depends on your numbers. Divide the yearly price of a subscription by what a platform charges per ticket: if you sell more tickets than the result, the subscription is cheaper. In the worked example above, that break-even point is around 114 tickets a year.
Can we pass the booking fee on to the buyer?
On platforms that charge per ticket you usually can, as a surcharge on top of your price. With Passavo there is no ticket fee: the buyer pays exactly the price you set, and that is the price shown on your sales page too.