You priced your ticket at $100. A nice round number, the sort that makes budgeting easy. Then the payout lands and it is not $100, and you find yourself doing arithmetic you did not sign up for. So how much of ticket price do you keep, really? On a $100 ticket the answer ranges from roughly $91 to nearly $97 depending entirely on which platform sits between you and your buyer, and across a 500-seat event that spread is thousands of pounds you either keep or quietly hand over. Let us do the maths nobody shows you on the pricing page.
The quick version: every platform takes a cut, but the shape of the cut matters enormously. Some charge a percentage that grows with your ticket price, some charge a flat fee per ticket, and one cost (card processing, usually around 2.9% plus 30 cents) is unavoidable no matter what. Your ticketing take rate is the difference between those models, and on higher-priced tickets it is the percentage platforms that hurt most. Here is the worked breakdown on a single $100 ticket.
How much of ticket price do you keep on $100, platform by platform
These figures assume a US-based, paid $100 ticket where you, the organiser, absorb the fees so you can see your true take-home. (If you pass fees to attendees instead, your buyer pays a higher total at checkout, which is its own conversion problem, but the platform's cut is the same money either way.) All percentages are from each platform's current published rates.
| Platform | Fee on a $100 ticket | You keep | Fee model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | ~$8.39 (3.7% + $1.79 service, +2.9% processing) | ~$91.61 | Percentage + per-ticket + processing |
| TryBooking (US) | ~$4.50 ($1/ticket + 3.5%) | ~$95.50 | Per-ticket + percentage |
| Ticket Tailor (pay as you go) | ~$4.05 ($0.85 flat + ~$3.20 processing) | ~$95.95 | Flat per-ticket + your own processing |
| Flat-fee / own-processor model (e.g. eventcloud) | ~$3.20 (just card processing, $0 platform per-ticket) | ~$96.80 | Fixed subscription, $0 per ticket |
The Eventbrite figure is straight from their current US rates: a 3.7% plus $1.79 service fee comes to $5.49 on a $100 ticket, and the 2.9% payment processing adds $2.90, for $8.39 total, leaving you $91.61 (per Eventbrite's pricing, with the same maths worked through by independent fee breakdowns). That is the headline number this whole article hangs on.
On a $100 ticket the gap between best and worst is about $5. On 500 tickets that is $2,500. The fee you wave through on one ticket is a budget line across a full house.
Why the fee model matters more than the headline rate
Here is the part that catches people out. A percentage-based fee is invisible on a cheap ticket and brutal on an expensive one. On a $10 ticket, 3.7% is 37 cents and nobody notices. On a $100 ticket it is $3.70, and on a $400 conference pass it is $14.80 in percentage alone, before the fixed fees and processing. The platform's take scales with your ambition, which is a strange thing to sign up for when the platform does no extra work to sell a pricier ticket.
A flat per-ticket fee does the opposite. Ticket Tailor's roughly $0.85 per ticket is the same whether you sell a $10 ticket or a $400 one (flat-fee models are detailed in various platform comparisons), which means on higher-value tickets the flat model gets dramatically cheaper as a percentage of the sale. And a fixed-subscription model with no per-ticket fee at all, where the only deduction from the ticket is the card-processing cost, lands you closest to the full face value: around $96.80 of your $100, with the platform charging a predictable flat monthly fee rather than a slice of every sale.
The one cost you cannot escape
Notice that even the cheapest column is not $100. That is the processing fee, typically about 2.9% plus 30 cents, charged by the card networks and payment processors like Stripe (as we cover in our Eventbrite comparison). No platform can wave this away, because it is not theirs to wave: it is the cost of accepting a card. Anyone advertising "zero fees" is either absorbing the processing cost into a subscription, applying it elsewhere, or being economical with the truth. The honest framing is not "no fees ever", it is "no platform fees on top of unavoidable processing", and roughly $96.80 on a $100 ticket is about as much as you can realistically keep.
A note on the platforms that do not fit the table
Two players deserve an honest mention because their pricing does not map cleanly onto a single $100 ticket. Humanitix uses a percentage-plus-fixed booking fee that varies by currency, and crucially it is a not-for-profit that directs its profits to charity, so the fee you pay funds education projects rather than shareholder returns; if the social mission matters to you, the maths is only part of the picture (their current rates are on the Humanitix pricing page). Cvent and the enterprise tier sit in a different universe entirely: they charge per registrant (commonly in the $7 to $12 range) on top of a large annual licence, so on a $100 ticket your cost is the per-registrant fee regardless of ticket price, which only makes sense at enterprise scale with the services to match.
What this means across a real event
One ticket is a rounding error. A full event is not. Take a 500-person conference at $100 a head, which is $50,000 of face value. On Eventbrite's rates you would hand over roughly $4,195 in fees. On a flat-subscription, own-processor model you would lose around $1,600 to processing and pay a fixed software subscription on top, keeping the difference. That gap, often several thousand pounds per event, is the entire reason fee model deserves more attention than the headline percentage. It is also why a flat monthly cost becomes more attractive the more, and the bigger, your events get: your success stops being a billing event. Scale the same maths to a multi-day summit selling several hundred premium passes and the difference between a percentage cut and a flat fee can comfortably cover a speaker, a stage set, or the catering you were about to trim.
None of this means the percentage platforms are wrong for everyone. For a one-off free event, or a tiny paid gathering where a monthly subscription would never pay for itself, a pay-per-ticket platform with no fixed cost is the sensible choice, and you should not pay a subscription to sell 40 tickets a year. The fee model that wins is simply the one that matches your volume and ticket price, and the only way to know is to run your own numbers.
The bottom line
How much of a $100 ticket you keep comes down to one decision: percentage fees that grow with your ticket price, or a flat or fixed model that does not. On a single ticket the difference is a few dollars; across a sold-out event it is real money that could have funded the next one. Run the maths on your actual ticket price and volume before you commit, because the cheapest-looking option on a $10 ticket can be the most expensive on a $100 one. To see the flat-fee maths against Eventbrite's, start with our Eventbrite comparison or the full breakdown on our pricing page.
