Three do, properly. Humanitix cuts its US rate from 5% plus $1.29 to 3.9% plus $1.29 per paid ticket. Ticket Tailor halves its per-ticket fee, taking $0.85 down to $0.43. Zeffy charges registered nonprofits nothing at all. Eventbrite has no nonprofit rate on paid tickets. And a discount on a percentage is still a percentage, which matters enormously once you pass a few hundred tickets.
Which platforms have a nonprofit rate, and what it actually is
Start with the ones that publish a number, because a rate you have to ask a salesperson for is not a rate, it is a negotiation.
Humanitix publishes a full NFP, charity and school rate table. In US dollars the standard booking fee is 5% plus $1.29 per paid ticket and the discounted rate is 3.9% plus $1.29. In sterling it drops from 5.6% plus £0.55 to 4% plus £0.30. Both are inclusive of card processing, which is unusual and worth noticing: there is no separate Stripe line to add. Registered charities, not-for-profits, schools and school societies qualify, as do events run in support of another charity.
Ticket Tailor offers registered charities 50% off its per-ticket fee. Pay as you sell falls from $0.85 to $0.43, and prepaid credits from $0.30 to $0.15. Read the small print though: the discount applies to the ticket fee only and does not touch payment processing, which you pay separately through Stripe, PayPal or Square.
Zeffy charges registered nonprofits nothing. No platform fee, no transaction fee, no processing fee. It funds itself by asking donors and ticket buyers for an optional tip at checkout. It is nonprofit-only, so no commercial organiser can use it, and it is built around fundraising rather than multi-track conference registration.
Eventbrite does not publish a nonprofit rate for paid tickets. Free tickets carry no service fee, which is genuinely useful, but a charity selling a $50 gala ticket in the US pays the same 3.7% plus $1.79 service fee and 2.9% processing as a commercial promoter.
TryBooking keeps free events free at no cost and runs one published rate per region rather than a charity tier: in the UK, £0.15 to the buyer plus a 5% processing fee to the organiser; in Australia, $0.50 plus 2.5%.
A discount on a percentage is still a percentage
This is the sentence that should decide the question, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. Humanitix's NFP rate is a real, generous reduction. It is also still a slope. On a $50 ticket it costs $3.24 rather than $3.79, which is a saving of 55 cents a ticket, and 55 cents a ticket is worth having. But at 10,000 tickets the discounted rate still takes $32,400, because the thing being discounted is the rate and not the shape.
The shape is what determines your bill as you grow. A percentage means your ticketing cost is a function of your success. A flat subscription means it is a function of how many of your staff need a login. Charities are told to watch their overheads more closely than anyone, which makes it slightly odd that the sector's default ticketing arrangement is the one that grows every time the sector does better.
What a year actually costs at three volumes
The table assumes a $50 paid ticket, one organiser account, US rates, and one year of activity across however many events it takes to reach the volume. It shows platform fees only, because that is the part the platform controls. One caveat before you read it: the Humanitix figures are all-in because its booking fee includes card processing, whereas Ticket Tailor, Eventbrite and eventcloud all sit on top of separate card processing, which on a $50 ticket runs to roughly $1.45 to $1.75 depending on the gateway.
| Platform and nonprofit rate | 500 tickets | 5,000 tickets | 50,000 tickets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zeffy, free to registered nonprofits | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Ticket Tailor charity rate, prepaid, $0.15 per ticket | $75 | $750 | $7,500 |
| Ticket Tailor charity rate, pay as you sell, $0.43 per ticket | $215 | $2,150 | $21,500 |
| eventcloud, flat annual licence, one user, no nonprofit rate | $1,250 | $1,250 | $1,250 |
| Humanitix NFP rate, 3.9% plus $1.29, card fees included | $1,620 | $16,200 | $162,000 |
| Eventbrite, no nonprofit rate, 3.7% plus $1.79 service | $1,820 | $18,200 | $182,000 |
Where does a flat subscription overtake a discounted percentage?
Divide the annual subscription by the per-ticket fee and you have the crossover volume. On a $50 ticket, against a $1,250 annual licence for one seat:
Ticketing That Doesn't Tax the Cause
Flat pricing means every fundraising event keeps its margin, whether you sell fifty tickets or five thousand.
Humanitix's NFP rate of $3.24 a ticket is overtaken at 386 paid tickets a year.
Eventbrite, with no nonprofit rate at all, at $3.64 of service fee, is overtaken at 344.
Ticket Tailor's charity pay-as-you-sell rate of $0.43 holds out until 2,907 tickets.
Ticket Tailor's charity prepaid rate of $0.15 holds out until 8,334.
Zeffy is never overtaken, because free is free.
Two things follow from that list, and they are both worth saying plainly. If you are a US-registered nonprofit whose events fit Zeffy's fundraising shape, Zeffy is the cheapest answer on this page and no subscription competes with zero. If your tickets are cheap and your volume is modest, Ticket Tailor's halved rate is very hard to beat. The flat model starts winning somewhere in the hundreds against a percentage, and somewhere in the thousands against a low flat per-ticket fee. Run it on your own ticket price, because a percentage scales with price as well as volume and a $200 conference pass moves every one of those crossover points.
What you have to do to get the discounted rate
None of these rates apply automatically. Humanitix asks you to sign in with your organisation's official email address, message its team, and supply proof of status: a link to a government charity registration, a tax-exempt certificate, a school website, or a certificate of incorporation for a not-for-profit society. Ticket Tailor wants a scanned official document showing charitable status with a registration number where you have one.
The detail people trip over: Humanitix applies its rate per event and per account. If four people in your organisation each create events under their own login, each of those accounts needs its own approved application, and any event created before approval sells at the standard rate. Sort it before your first on-sale, not after.
What the discount does not cover
Ticket Tailor's 50% applies to its own fee only. Stripe, PayPal or Square still charge you for taking the money, and on a $50 ticket that is more than the ticket fee itself, discounted or not.
Humanitix's box office feature, used for card sales at the door through its host app, runs at a single rate of 3% plus $1 in USD with no nonprofit tier applied.
Zeffy's model depends on ticket buyers voluntarily tipping. Most do, but the platform's costs are being met by your supporters rather than by you, which some boards are entirely relaxed about and others are not. It is a legitimate question to put in front of your trustees rather than a hidden catch.
Where eventcloud fits, honestly
eventcloud has no nonprofit discount. A registered charity pays the same $125 per user per month as a corporate events team, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. What the flat subscription does instead is remove the per-ticket fee entirely: unlimited events, unlimited ticket types, unlimited tickets and unlimited registrations on one price that does not move when your gala sells out. Card processing is charged by Stripe directly into your own account, so the money never sits with us.
Whether that is a better deal than a discounted percentage is a volume question with a specific answer, and the table above gives it. Under a few hundred paid tickets a year, it is not.
Who this is not for
eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If your fundraising programme runs mainly on a screen with a streaming layer behind it, look at platforms built for that instead.
Stripe is the only system eventcloud connects to. If your donor records live in a fundraising CRM, that is an export to Excel at our end and an import at yours rather than an automatic handover.
And if you run one raffle night a year and sell 120 tickets, a subscription is the wrong shape entirely. Take the charity rate, or take Zeffy, and spend the difference on the cause.
The charities page sets out how the flat model works for cause-led organisations, the pricing page has the figure with nothing behind it, the Eventbrite comparison runs the same event through both models, and the full cost-at-volume breakdown does the same sums without the nonprofit rates applied.