Score five things, in this order: total platform cost at your real volume and at ten times it (25%), check-in and day-of reliability (20%), data ownership and the exit clause (20%), registration fit for your attendee types (20%), and support plus security (15%). Score any cash advance, free onboarding or marketing promise separately, as financing, with its interest rate written down. That is the whole scorecard; the rest of this article is why.
Why does the weighting matter more than the questions?
Because the weighting decides the winner before a single demo. Earlier this month São Paulo FC's stadium ticketing tender, as reported by TicketNews, weighted 40% of the marks on a revenue advance, 35% on the value of a corporate suite, and 20% on the ticketing and access-control service itself. Ticketmaster won with a R$110 million advance repaid from a fee of up to 10% per digital ticket. Whatever you think of that deal, the club got precisely what it scored for: money first, ticketing second. Most organisers writing an RFP do the same thing by accident, by listing forty feature questions and no weights, which means the vendor with the longest tick-list wins even if its fee doubles your cost in year three.
A weighted scorecard fixes that in one line per criterion. Write the weights down before the first sales call, share them with every bidder, and make the vendors fill in your table rather than sending theirs.
What should "total cost" actually mean in a ticketing RFP?
The total platform bill over a contract term at three volumes: what you sell today, what you would sell if the event doubled, and roughly ten times today. Not the headline rate. A per-ticket fee looks small on a slide and enormous on a sold-out year, while a flat licence looks expensive on a slide and invisible at scale, so the only honest comparison is the annual number at each volume. The table below shows platform fees only, on a $50 ticket, with card processing left out of every row because every platform passes it through at a similar rate. Figures were read from each vendor's pricing page in September 2026; where a vendor publishes no price, the row says so rather than guessing.
| Platform and published rule | 500 tickets | 5,000 tickets | 50,000 tickets | Cost shape |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite, 3.7% plus $1.79 per paid ticket | $1,820 | $18,200 | $182,000 | Rises with every ticket |
| Humanitix, 2.1% plus $0.99 per paid ticket | $1,020 | $10,200 | $102,000 | Rises with every ticket |
| Ticket Tailor, £0.60 plus VAT per paid ticket (UK rate) | £360 | £3,600 | £36,000 | Rises with every ticket |
| Cvent, third-party reported $7 to $12 per registrant plus licence | $3,500 plus licence | $35,000 plus licence | $350,000 plus licence | Rises with every registrant |
| Swoogo Professional, $11,800 a year, one full user | $11,800 | $11,800 | $11,800 | Flat, add-ons extra |
| Bizzabo, from $17,999 a year, three seats | $17,999 | $17,999 | $17,999 | Flat, add-ons extra |
| vFairs, quote only, licence banded by registrations | Quote | Quote | Quote | Steps up by band |
| eventcloud Team, $1,250 a year per user, unlimited tickets | $1,250 | $1,250 | $1,250 | Flat per user |
Read the shape column, not just the numbers. Three of the models charge you more for growing; three charge the same whether you sell 500 tickets or 50,000; one will not tell you until you ask. Your RFP should require every bidder to complete this table for your own ticket price and your own three volumes, including add-ons, and to state the price in year two and year three of the contract. Cvent's per-registrant figures above come from procurement write-ups rather than a public rate card, which is itself a scoring point: a vendor that publishes its price has already answered a question the others make you negotiate.
How do you score check-in and day-of reliability?
With a live test, not a feature list. Ask each bidder to run a 30-minute simulated door: your real ticket types, a printed badge, a phone with the venue wifi switched off, a duplicate scan, a refunded ticket, and a walk-up. Score how many of those the scanner handles without a support call. Then ask for the incident history: how many outages in the last 24 months, how long each lasted, and whether any fell on a customer's event day. The Eventbrite check-in app, Cvent's OnArrival, Swoogo's Go Onsite and eventcloud's check-in and badge printing all scan QR codes; what separates them is what happens when the wifi drops and how fast a queue of 800 clears, and only a test tells you that.
Weight this at 20% because it is the criterion with the most expensive failure mode. A fee overpayment costs money. A door that stops scanning at 08:45 costs the event.
What should the data and exit clause say?
Three things, in writing: the attendee data is yours, you can export all of it at any time in a documented format, and leaving the platform costs nothing beyond the notice period. Ask for the export format by name, because it varies. Most platforms hand you a CSV. On eventcloud the route is export to Excel (.xlsx), capped at 10,000 rows per export, which is fine for a spreadsheet and a nuisance for some import scripts, and a bidder should tell you that sort of thing unprompted. Ask who owns the buyer relationship on a marketplace, because on Eventbrite the follower and discovery audience stays with the marketplace when you go. Ask whether payouts are settlements or advances, because an advance turns a software contract into a loan and the loan is what makes leaving expensive. Our guide to switching ticketing platforms lists what usually comes with you and what gets left behind.
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.
This is also where to score contract length. A five-year term with an advance repaid from ticket revenue, which is what São Paulo signed, is a five-year lock-in by construction. Score anything over 24 months down unless the exit clause is genuinely clean.
How should you score registration fit?
Against your attendee types, not against a demo event. List the categories you actually sell to (delegate, exhibitor, sponsor, speaker, press, staff, VIP) and the questions each one must answer, then ask the bidder to build that form live. Score conditional routing (does the exhibitor see the exhibitor questions and only those), group and invoice purchasing, discount and affiliate codes, multi-currency, and how the confirmation email and ticket look on a phone. This is the criterion where the enterprise platforms earn their price: Cvent and Swoogo Enterprise do deep conditional logic that a marketplace tool does not. It is also where a lot of RFPs over-buy, so weight the questions you will use this year, not the ones you might use in 2029.
Should a cash advance or free onboarding count in the score?
Yes, but on a separate sheet with its own interest rate. An advance repaid from a percentage fee is a loan whose repayment rises with your success; a free onboarding in exchange for a three-year term is a discount financed by lock-in. Both can be rational. Neither belongs in the ticketing score, because a platform that leads with money is telling you where its margin comes from. Put the sweetener in a financing column, convert it to an annual cost of capital, and compare it to what a bank would charge. If the sweetener only exists because the fee is a percentage, the fee is the price of the loan.
Weight the box office above the bank. If the bank is offering something, score it as a bank, in its own column, with a rate.
The ten questions to put in the RFP
Complete our cost table at 500, 5,000 and 50,000 tickets on our ticket price, including every add-on we would need, for years one, two and three.
State your fee rule, the price of each add-on, and whether any of it changes with our volume.
Where does ticket revenue settle, on whose schedule, and is any part of it an advance?
What export formats exist, what fields are included, and what does leaving cost?
Run our simulated door test and share incident history for the last 24 months.
Build our registration form for our attendee types, live, in the demo.
Which payment gateways and currencies are supported, and who is the merchant of record?
What security attestations are current (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR processing terms), and where is data stored?
What support is included at our tier, in which hours, and what does day-of support cost?
Name three customers of our size we can call, and one that left in the last year.
Who this is not for
eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If most of your programme happens on a screen with a studio-grade production layer behind it, Bizzabo, vFairs or Cvent will serve you better, and your scorecard should add a streaming criterion this article does not cover. eventcloud is Stripe-only on the integrations page. It does not connect to a CRM or a marketing-automation tool, so if your RFP scores native Salesforce or HubSpot sync you will be exporting to Excel and importing at your end, and Cvent, Swoogo or Eventbrite will score higher on that line. eventcloud does not run a discovery marketplace. If strangers finding your listing is how you sell, Eventbrite's fee is buying something real and belongs in your marketing column, not your cost column. And if you sell a few hundred tickets a year, a per-ticket platform is cheaper than any flat licence, including ours, and Ticket Tailor or Humanitix should win on the cost line.
Where eventcloud fits
For in-person conferences, trade shows and corporate events that sell in the thousands to an audience the organiser built, eventcloud is one of the flat-cost rows in the table: $125 per user per month, or $1,250 a year, with unlimited events, tickets and registrations, no per-ticket or per-attendee charge, and ticket revenue paid straight into the organiser's own Stripe account. The limits are real and belong in your scorecard: pricing is per user from the first seat, white-label branding sits with Enterprise and there is no white-label add-on to buy on a Team seat, the platform is in-person only, and the only connector is Stripe. Registered charities and schools can apply for the platform free for up to three users. The full rate card is on the pricing page, and the side-by-side against the per-ticket and enterprise models is in the comparison hub. Fill in the table with your own numbers first. If the winner changes when you move from 5,000 tickets to 50,000, you have found the criterion that matters.
