Online ticket sales for fundraisers come with a quiet leak. Every booking fee, service charge and per-ticket cut is money a supporter meant for your cause that quietly ends up somewhere else. On a single gala that might be a rounding error. Across a year of quiz nights, galas and community gigs it can add up to a chunk of a salary you did not get to fund. This guide is about plugging that leak: understanding exactly where the money goes when you sell tickets online for a fundraiser, and choosing a model that keeps as much of every donation as possible on your side of the ledger.
The short answer, up front: the fee you should worry about is the platform's per-ticket booking fee, not the card-processing cost. Payment processing is a small, unavoidable fact of life. The booking fee is a choice, and on charity events it is the difference between a supporter's tenner arriving mostly intact or arriving noticeably lighter.
Where the money goes in online ticket sales for fundraisers
When someone buys a fundraiser ticket online, their payment splits three ways before it reaches your bank. First there is payment processing, the card fee, typically around 2.9% plus a small fixed amount per transaction through a processor like Stripe. This one is essentially unavoidable; every platform pays it because moving card money costs money. Second there is the platform's booking or service fee, the ticketing company's own cut, which varies enormously and is where most of the leak lives. Third, if the platform runs on a subscription, there is a flat fee you pay regardless of volume.
The sleight of hand to watch is who pays the booking fee. Many platforms let you "pass it on" to the buyer, so it never shows on your dashboard, and organisers conclude the platform is free. It is not free. Your supporter simply paid it, which means they had less left to give, or grumbled at a checkout total that read like a Ryanair booking. Either way, the cause lost.
On a charity ticket, the booking fee is not a cost of doing business. It is a donation that took a wrong turn.
The fee, in real donations
Numbers make this concrete. Take a modest £25 fundraiser ticket and 500 supporters through the door. Here is roughly what the platform's own fee takes out before card processing, using current published rates.
| Platform | Booking fee per £25 ticket | Taken across 500 tickets | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite (UK) | About £2.33 | About £1,165 | Roughly 6.95% plus 59p per ticket |
| Humanitix (UK) | About £0.50 | About £250 | Around 2%, and donated to charity |
| Flat-fee platform | £0 booking fee | £0 | Subscription cost instead, plus Stripe processing |
The gap between the top and bottom rows is not theoretical. On this one event it is roughly £900 that either reaches your cause or does not, depending purely on which logo sits on the checkout page. Run four events like it a year and you are choosing whether to keep the better part of four thousand pounds. Sources for the numbers: our 2026 ticketing fees comparison and the Humanitix review.
Every per-ticket fee you avoid is a donation that actually reaches the cause. Credit: Brano / Unsplash
Per-ticket versus flat: which model keeps more
There are two honest ways to price fundraiser ticketing, and the right one depends entirely on your volume.
A per-ticket model charges a fee on every booking. Its great virtue is that it costs nothing when you sell nothing, so it suits the occasional small fundraiser and the one-off gala. Its vice is that it scales with your success: the more you raise, the more it takes, which is a strange thing to sign up for when the whole point is to raise as much as possible.
A flat subscription model charges a fixed amount per user per month and takes nothing per ticket beyond the unavoidable card processing. Its virtue is that your fundraising success is never a billing event; sell a thousand more tickets and the platform cost does not move. Its vice is the standing cost: below a certain volume, a subscription can cost more than a per-ticket fee would have. Be honest with yourself about the maths. A flat model like eventcloud's flat per-seat pricing, where you connect your own Stripe and pay no per-ticket fee, tends to win once you are selling a few thousand paid tickets across the year. Below that, a per-ticket platform may genuinely be cheaper.
And here is a fair word for the per-ticket camp: Humanitix donates its booking fee to charity, funding children's education and health programmes, and has channelled over 16.5 million dollars to good causes to date. If you run a grassroots one-off and use Humanitix, the fee itself does good rather than padding a shareholder. For a single small fundraiser, that is a genuinely lovely outcome and we will happily say so. The subscription argument only overtakes it when your volume is high enough that a flat cost keeps more overall.
Two extra ways to protect the total
Keep the ticket and the donation separate. In the UK, Gift Aid lets a charity reclaim 25p for every pound on eligible donations from taxpaying supporters, but the price of admission to an event is generally not a straightforward Gift Aid donation because the buyer receives something in return. The practical move is to sell the ticket at cost and offer a clearly optional donation on top, which can be Gift Aid eligible when it is a genuine voluntary gift. Check the current HMRC rules for your specific event, and pick a checkout that lets you add that optional donation line cleanly.
Use comps for your major donors, not discount codes you forget to switch off. Your biggest supporters and sponsors should not be queuing to pay for a ticket to the event they are underwriting. A proper comp ticket type, capped and tracked, lets you invite them without leaking free general-admission codes to the whole internet. It keeps the guest list tidy and the revenue honest.
The throughline is simple: fundraiser ticketing should move a supporter's money to your cause with the least possible taken in the middle. Card processing is the toll you cannot avoid. The booking fee is the one you can. Choose the model that fits your volume, keep the ticket and the donation distinct, and comp the people who deserve it. If you would like to see how flat, own-Stripe ticketing is set up for good causes, take a look at eventcloud for charities.