On some platforms, yes. Ticket Tailor and Eventcube both let you set a booking fee of your own and keep the difference. Eventbrite, Humanitix and TryBooking do not: they give you a switch that decides who pays their fee, which is a different thing entirely. Knowing which kind of platform you are on is worth several thousand pounds a year at volume.
The confusion is understandable, because the industry uses one phrase for two opposite arrangements. "Pass on the fees" can mean "the platform's fee appears as a line on the buyer's receipt instead of coming out of your revenue", or it can mean "you invent a fee, name it, charge it and bank it". Only the second one is a revenue line. Here is which platforms offer which, and what each of them costs you before you add anything.
What is the difference between a booking fee and a passed-on platform fee?
A passed-on platform fee is the platform's money, temporarily routed through your checkout. You choose whether it comes out of the buyer's pocket or yours, and that is the whole of your control. An organiser booking fee is your money: you decide the amount, you decide the label, and it lands in your account with the ticket price.
The practical test is one question. If I set this number to zero, does the platform still get paid? If yes, you are looking at your own fee. If the number cannot go to zero because it is the platform's charge, you are looking at a pass-through switch.
Every line on that receipt belongs to somebody. The question is which lines belong to you · credit: Towfiqu barbhuiya / Pexels
Which platforms let you set your own booking fee?
Ticket Tailor is the clearest yes on the market. Its pricing page states you can add any booking fee you like to the ticket price so that your fees are covered and you keep the entire face value. In practice you get three separate instruments: a booking fee charged as a fixed amount per ticket, a transaction fee charged once per order as a flat amount, a percentage or both, and a sales tax line. You can set defaults across your whole box office and override them per event, and the help centre walkthrough is explicit that none of this happens automatically. You build it.
Eventcube is also a yes, with an asterisk that costs money. Its pricing FAQ says you set and keep both the face value and the booking fee on every ticket sold, with Eventcube's fee taken as a percentage of that total amount. Read that last clause twice. If you sell a $50 ticket and add a $5 booking fee, Eventcube's percentage applies to $55, not $50. On the free Starter plan that percentage is 5%, and on Pro it is 3%. Your fee is genuinely yours, but the platform takes a slice of it on the way past.
Which platforms only let you choose who pays?
Eventbrite gives you an absorb-or-pass-on setting, configurable per ticket type, so you can swallow the fee on a cheap general admission and push it through on an expensive VIP. What you cannot do is change the amount or keep any of it.
Humanitix offers three positions rather than two. Its booking fee is passed on by default, you can split it by choosing a percentage to absorb, or you can switch on tip fees, where the fee is absorbed into your price and the buyer is invited to cover it voluntarily. That is a genuinely thoughtful design for a charitable audience, and it is still Humanitix's fee.
TryBooking charges two things in the UK, a 5% booking fee and a 15p ticket fee, and lets you decide who pays each one independently, which is more granular than most. Its account setting for this applies across every event on the account. Adding a fee of your own on top of the ticket price is not part of the offer, and for organisers using their own Stripe Connect account, the Stripe fees specifically cannot be passed to the buyer.
What does each platform cost before you add anything?
The fee you can charge only matters relative to the fee you are being charged. The table below prices a 50 pound ticket at three volumes, in sterling, counting the platform's own fee only. Two important caveats, both of which change the answer: TryBooking's standard UK rate includes VAT and all payment processing, while the Ticket Tailor and own-Stripe rows exclude payment processing, which Stripe bills separately at roughly 1.5% plus 20p on UK cards. The eventcloud row is an annual subscription for a single user and is unaffected by volume, which is why it does not move.
What Would Zero Booking Fees Save You?
eventcloud charges a flat subscription, not a cut of every ticket. Compare it with what your current platform takes.
| Platform and route | Can you add a fee of your own? | 500 tickets | 5,000 tickets | 50,000 tickets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ticket Tailor, pay as you sell | Yes, booking fee and transaction fee, both yours | 360 pounds | 3,600 pounds | 36,000 pounds |
| Ticket Tailor, credits bought upfront | Yes, same instruments | 132 pounds | 1,320 pounds | 13,200 pounds |
| TryBooking UK, standard rate | No, only who pays theirs | 1,325 pounds | 13,250 pounds | 132,500 pounds |
| TryBooking UK, your own Stripe | No, only who pays theirs | 375 pounds | 3,750 pounds | 37,500 pounds |
| eventcloud Team, one user, annual | No per-ticket fee exists to pass on | 950 pounds | 950 pounds | 950 pounds |
Ticket Tailor's prepaid credits are the cheapest per-ticket rate published by anyone in this comparison, and at 500 tickets they are cheaper than a subscription by a wide margin. At 50,000 they are not. That is the shape of every per-ticket model: the line starts low and never stops climbing, because the fee is calculated on your success. A flat subscription starts higher and then stops. Where the two lines cross is the only number that matters, and it is different for every organiser.
Is charging your own booking fee actually a good idea?
It depends on where you sell and how honest your checkout is.
In the United States, tread carefully. Ticket Tailor itself warns organisers that adding a transaction fee may sit badly with the Federal Trade Commission's rule on unfair or deceptive fees, and suggests folding extra costs into the ticket price instead. Several jurisdictions now require the total price to be shown up front, and a fee revealed at the final step is precisely the pattern regulators have been fining people for.
There is also a conversion argument that has nothing to do with law. A buyer who reaches the payment screen and watches the number grow is a buyer with a fresh opportunity to reconsider. Whether a labelled fee reads as transparency or as a sting depends entirely on your audience, and a members' club will forgive what a first-time festival buyer will not.
Where it genuinely earns its keep is cost recovery rather than profit. If your platform charges you 60p plus VAT per ticket and you add a 75p booking fee, you have made the ticket price mean what it says and covered your costs. If you add 4 pounds and call it an admin fee, you have invented a second ticket price and your reviews will say so.
Where does eventcloud fit?
Differently, and it is worth being precise about how. eventcloud does not charge a per-ticket fee at all, so there is no platform charge to pass on, absorb or split. The subscription is a flat 95 pounds per user per month, or 950 pounds per user per year, and it covers unlimited events, unlimited tickets and unlimited registrations, with revenue settling directly into the organiser's own Stripe account. The price is the same whether you sell 500 tickets or 50,000. Your success is never a billing event. Registered charities and schools get it free for life for up to three users, which you can read about on the charities page.
That is a different answer to the question rather than a better one. If your whole reason for wanting an organiser booking fee is to neutralise a per-ticket charge, a platform with no per-ticket charge removes the problem instead of solving it. If you want a booking fee as an independent revenue line, Ticket Tailor's toolkit is the most flexible thing published, and our Ticket Tailor comparison sets out where each platform stops.
Who this is not for
eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If most of your programme happens on a screen with a production layer behind it, Bizzabo or vFairs will serve you better.
eventcloud is priced per user, starting at one user, so a team of eight pays for eight seats. For a volunteer committee running two jumble sales a year, a per-ticket platform at pence per ticket will cost less and nobody should pretend otherwise.
Stripe is the only outside system eventcloud talks to. If you keep your contact database in another tool and expect registrations to land in it on their own, they will not, and that hand-off will be a spreadsheet export followed by an import at your end.
White-label capability sits inside an Enterprise agreement. There is no white-label add-on to buy at any price, so if a fully unbranded checkout is non-negotiable on a small budget, price that in before you compare anything.
If you would rather the fee conversation simply stopped, the pricing page shows the whole bill on one line, and it is the same line next year whatever your sales do.
