A San Diego festival has cut the fee on its 2027 general admission pass from roughly $56 to 75 cents by moving to ShopTickets, a platform its own co-founder built on Shopify. The pass now costs $295 all-in. For organisers, the interesting part is not the discount but the question it raises: which number does your ticketing platform multiply?
What did Same Same But Different actually change?
Same Same But Different, the San Diego festival, announced that its 2027 Community Tier general admission pass will cost $295 all-in, with a ticketing fee of 75 cents. Ticket News reported that opening-tier passes previously carried a fee of about $56, against a comparable price of around $355. Digital Music News reached the same figures on 5 October and described the move as a 99 per cent fee reduction.
The vehicle is ShopTickets, built by festival co-founder Brad Sweet. It runs on Shopify's commerce infrastructure, and per Ticket News it had already handled around $250,000 in sales across eight smaller Same Same events and other promoters before the 2027 rollout. The festival also holds an equity stake in it, which is worth knowing before anyone calls it a neutral experiment.
How does ShopTickets charge?
It charges a flat fee per ticket, on two tiers. According to its Shopify App Store listing, the free plan costs $1.50 per ticket, and the Pro plan costs $49 a month plus $0.75 per ticket. Email sends are metered separately, at $1.00 or $0.75 per 1,000 depending on the plan. Card processing sits on top, and Ticket News puts Shopify's rate at roughly 2.5 to 2.9 per cent.
The same listing says events and ticket types are unlimited, which is a different thing from tickets being unlimited. Events are free to create. Tickets are not free to sell.
A flat fee per ticket is a smaller meter, but it is still a meter, and it still runs faster the better you do.
What does 75 cents cost at 500, 5,000 and 50,000 tickets?
Seventy-five cents sounds like nothing until you multiply it. The table below compares the ShopTickets Pro plan's platform charges over a year with eventcloud's Team plan for a single user on annual billing ($1,250). Both exclude card processing, which is billed separately in each case, and ShopTickets email charges.
| Tickets sold in a year | ShopTickets Pro (platform charges) | eventcloud Team (one user, annual billing) |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $963 | $1,250 |
| 5,000 | $4,338 | $1,250 |
| 50,000 | $38,088 | $1,250 |
ShopTickets Pro is $588 a year in subscription plus 75 cents a ticket. On those numbers it is cheaper than eventcloud's single seat below roughly 880 tickets a year, and dearer above it. That is the honest crossover for a one-person team. A five-person team on eventcloud pays $6,250 a year, which moves the crossover to about 7,500 tickets. The flat line only wins when the volume is there, and eventcloud is priced per user, so headcount matters as much as ticket count.
Tired of Fee Announcements? Go Flat
eventcloud charges one subscription with no per-ticket fees, so platform news stops being budget news.
What this means for event organisers
First, read the cost-scalability line, not the headline rate. A fee of 75 cents is the lowest per-ticket rate in the table, and it is still a charge that grows with every sale. Selling 100 times as many tickets multiplies the bill roughly fortyfold in the table above, and the platform did nothing extra to earn it. Compare that with eventcloud's model, where the price is the same whether you sell 500 tickets or 50,000, because the subscription counts users, not tickets.
Second, notice what the festival did with the saving. Its 2027 pass is about $60 cheaper than the comparable earlier one. When a ticketing fee drops from dollars to cents, the question becomes whether you pass the saving on, absorb it, or reinvest it. Compare that with Eventbrite's published rate of 3.7 per cent plus $1.79 per ticket, which on a $295 pass comes to about $12.71 before processing. Our Eventbrite comparison sets out the full arithmetic.
Third, check the payment route and the processing rate separately from the platform fee. Processing is a cost on every platform in this story, and it is the one line that a low headline fee can leave out.
Context the headlines skipped
Organisers building or buying their own ticketing is not new. Festivals have long run their own box offices, and the pattern repeats whenever fees drift away from what the service costs to deliver. What is new is how cheaply a store platform now lets a small team assemble one. A Shopify-based tool sells tickets as products in a store, which suits a festival that already sells merchandise there and wants a single customer record.
The trade-off is scope. A tool built around a shop does one job well and leaves the rest of an event to other tools. Conference and trade show organisers typically need registration forms with conditional questions, badge printing and check-in at the door in one place. Those needs, rather than the fee, usually decide the choice.
A sensible forward look: expect more events to ask what a ticket fee pays for. As metered pricing gets cheaper, the differences move from the size of the rate to the noun it multiplies: tickets, orders, emails or seats.
Where eventcloud fits
eventcloud charges $125 a month per user, with unlimited events, tickets and registrations and no per-ticket fees, and payments go through the organiser's own Stripe account. See the pricing page for the current plans. It is priced per user from one seat, white-label is an Enterprise feature rather than part of the Team plan, and eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If your programme lives on a screen rather than in a room, a different tool will serve you better. For in-person conferences, trade shows and galas that sell thousands of tickets, the flat line is the point.
