Why Event Organisers Are Paying Too Much in Ticketing Fees (And What to Do About It)

If you've been running events for a few years, you've probably noticed that ticketing feels more expensive than it used to. You're not imagining it. Fees across the industry have risen steadily, plan structures have become more complex, and the gap between what a platform charges and what it actually costs them to process a transaction has widened considerably.

Most organisers accept this as the cost of doing business. It doesn't have to be.

How fees crept up

The major ticketing platforms grew up in an era when online payment processing was expensive, event discovery was genuinely hard, and there were real costs to providing the infrastructure that organisers needed. High fees were partly justified by genuine overhead.

That world has changed. Payment processing costs have fallen dramatically. Cloud infrastructure is cheap. The marginal cost of handling an additional ticket sale is close to zero for a modern platform. But fees haven't followed costs downward, if anything, they've moved in the opposite direction.

The reason is straightforward: once a platform becomes the default, organisers keep using it out of habit, familiarity, and the friction of switching. Platforms have little competitive pressure to lower fees when their users don't leave.

The compounding problem

Ticketing fees compound in ways that aren't always obvious when you're looking at a pricing page.

Consider a typical fee structure:

• Platform service fee: 3.5% + £0.99 per ticket
• Payment processing: 2.9% + £0.30 per ticket
• Total on a £25 ticket: £2.54 per ticket, or just over 10%

Ten percent of your ticket revenue going to a platform before you've covered a single cost of running your event. For a 200-person event at £25 a ticket, £5,000 in revenue, that's £500 in platform and processing fees alone.

That's not a rounding error. That's a meaningful chunk of margin on an event where margin is already thin.

Where the money actually goes

Payment processing fees, typically 1.4–2.9% plus a small fixed amount, are largely unavoidable. They go to the card networks and payment processors, and the rate you get as a small business is broadly similar regardless of which ticketing platform you use.

The platform fee on top of that is the variable you can control. And that's where the difference between platforms is most significant.

A 2% platform fee versus a 5% platform fee on 1,000 tickets at £20 average is the difference between £400 and £1,000. The service provided is largely the same. The cost to you is not.

The switching problem

Most organisers who are paying too much know they're paying too much. The reason they don't switch is inertia: their buyers know the platform, their events are set up there, their historical data lives there.

This is a reasonable concern, but it's worth interrogating. Your buyers don't have loyalty to the ticketing platform, they have loyalty to you and your events. They will buy tickets through whatever link you send them. The platform is largely invisible to them as long as the checkout works.

Historical data is worth something, but it's not worth hundreds of pounds a year in excess fees indefinitely.

Switching ticketing platforms is a few hours of work. The payoff, if you're currently on a high-fee platform, is immediate and ongoing.

What to do about it

Audit your current fees. Look at your last few events and calculate the total platform fees paid, not just the headline percentage, but every line item including fixed per-ticket charges. The real number is often higher than the headline rate suggests.

Calculate your break-even. If you're on a monthly plan, work out whether the flat fee is actually saving you money versus a percentage model at your typical volume. Many organisers are on paid plans that don't break even for their actual ticket volumes.

Compare like for like. When looking at alternatives, make sure you're comparing total cost per ticket, platform fee plus payment processing, not just the headline rate. A platform advertising "no fees" is almost certainly charging buyers instead, which has its own costs.

Switch before your next event. If you're going to change platforms, the cleanest time to do it is before a new event rather than mid-run. Your buyers get a consistent experience and you start fresh on the new platform's reporting.

The bigger picture

Ticketing fees are a small industry that has historically been able to charge a lot because switching was hard and the alternatives were limited. That's changed. Modern platforms can process tickets at a fraction of the cost of legacy infrastructure, and there's no good reason for organisers to subsidise margins that were set in a different era.

The organisers who pay least are simply the ones who periodically ask whether what they're paying is still justified, and switch when the answer is no.