Ticket Tailor vs Humanitix comes down to one structural difference: Ticket Tailor charges a flat fee per ticket that never changes with the ticket price, while Humanitix charges a percentage plus a small fixed fee that grows as your ticket gets dearer. For small and charity events, that single choice decides who is cheaper, and the answer flips depending on what you sell your tickets for. This guide runs the actual maths so you can see where each one wins, and where a percentage quietly eats more than you expected.
Ticket Tailor vs Humanitix: the core difference
Both platforms are popular with small organisers, charities and community events, and both let you pass fees to the buyer so you keep the full face value. The difference is how the fee is built.
Ticket Tailor uses a flat per-ticket model. You pay a fixed amount per issued ticket regardless of whether the ticket costs 5 or 500. The published rate is 0.85 US dollars per ticket on Pay As You Sell, dropping to as low as 0.30 per ticket if you prepay for credits in bulk, both plus VAT. Payment processing from Stripe, PayPal or Square is charged separately on top.
Humanitix uses a percentage plus a fixed fee, and that fee is inclusive of payment processing when you use its default gateway. In the UK the standard booking fee is 4.67% plus 46p per ticket. In the US it is 5% plus 1.29 dollars per ticket. Humanitix is also a not-for-profit that donates its profits to charity, which is a genuine reason many organisers pick it over a purely commercial rival.
Who pays the booking fee: you or the buyer?
On both platforms you decide. By default Humanitix and Ticket Tailor both pass the booking fee to the buyer, added on top of the ticket price at checkout, so you take home the full face value. You can also choose to absorb the fee yourself, folding it into the price so the buyer sees one round number. Which you pick is partly presentation and partly maths. Passing the fee on keeps your revenue clean but makes the checkout total higher, which can dent conversion on price-sensitive community events. Absorbing it gives a friendlier headline price but quietly trims your margin on every sale. For charity and small events, a common middle path is to absorb the fixed portion so the price stays tidy while the percentage rides along, or simply to build the expected fee into your ticket price from the start. Whatever you choose, decide it before you go live, because switching mid-sale confuses buyers who already saw a different total.
The fees side by side
Here is the like-for-like picture. Because Ticket Tailor's platform fee sits on top of processing and Humanitix bundles processing in, a fair comparison adds a typical card fee (around 2.9% plus 30 cents) to the Ticket Tailor column.
| Platform | Fee model | Standard rate | Includes card processing? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ticket Tailor | Flat per ticket | 0.30 to 0.85 per ticket plus VAT | No, added separately |
| Humanitix (UK) | Percentage plus fixed | 4.67% plus 46p per ticket | Yes, all in |
| Humanitix (US) | Percentage plus fixed | 5% plus 1.29 per ticket | Yes, all in |
| Ticket Tailor charities | Flat per ticket | 50% off the standard rate | No, added separately |
| Humanitix charities (UK) | Percentage plus fixed | 3.33% plus 25p per ticket | Yes, all in |
Break-even maths: when does each one win?
The rule is simple once you see it. A flat fee is a fixed cost, so as a proportion of the ticket it shrinks the more expensive the ticket gets. A percentage does the opposite: it grows in step with the price. So Ticket Tailor tends to look better on dearer tickets, and Humanitix can hold its own on cheap ones where its fixed component is the smaller slice.
Take a US example, all fees included, on a per-ticket basis. On a 20 dollar ticket, Humanitix charges 5% plus 1.29, which is 2.29. Ticket Tailor charges 0.85 plus roughly 0.88 of processing, about 1.73. Ticket Tailor is a little cheaper. On a 50 dollar ticket, Humanitix is 3.79 while Ticket Tailor is about 2.60. On a 200 dollar ticket, Humanitix climbs to 11.29 while Ticket Tailor stays around 6.95. The gap widens as the price rises, because only one of the two fees is chasing the ticket price upward.
Now flip it to a cheap community ticket. On a 5 dollar ticket, Humanitix is 5% plus 1.29, which is 1.54. Ticket Tailor is 0.85 plus about 0.45 processing, roughly 1.30. Still close, and if you prepay Ticket Tailor credits at 0.30 the flat model pulls clearly ahead. The takeaway: on tiny tickets the two are neck and neck, and on anything mid-price or premium the flat fee wins comfortably.
A percentage fee feels small until your ticket price climbs. That is exactly when it stops being small.
The charity angle
Cost is not the only axis, and pretending it is would be dishonest. Humanitix donates its profits to charity and publishes an impact report to prove it, so every booking fee your attendees pay funds education and social programmes. For a charity or community organiser, routing fees to a good cause can matter more than shaving a few pence per ticket. Both platforms also cut their rates for registered charities: Ticket Tailor offers 50% off its per-ticket fee, and Humanitix drops to 3.33% plus 25p in the UK. If your event is a fundraiser, price both at your actual ticket value before deciding.
Beyond fees: what else separates them
Fees decide a lot, but not everything, and a fair comparison looks past the rate card. Both platforms handle the core job well: event pages, ticket types, discount codes, a check-in app and attendee data export. Humanitix leans into a fuller feature set, with seating maps, email campaigns and reporting built for organisers who want one tool to do more, and it makes a point of its social mission. Ticket Tailor leans into simplicity and speed of setup, which is exactly what a lot of small organisers want when they just need tickets live by Friday.
Payments are worth a closer look too. Ticket Tailor connects to Stripe, PayPal or Square, so your money lands in your own processor account and you control payouts. Humanitix can run through its own default gateway, which is what lets it bundle processing into a single all-in fee, though it does mean the fee and the payment flow are more tightly coupled. Neither approach is wrong, but if keeping your funds in your own account matters to you, that is a point in Ticket Tailor's favour. Support, dashboard feel and how each one handles refunds and edits are the sort of things worth testing on a small live event before you commit a big one.
A quick worked example for a charity fundraiser
Say you are running a charity quiz night with 150 tickets at 15 dollars each. On Humanitix UK charity rate the buyer fee is roughly 3.33% plus 25p, and on Ticket Tailor's charity rate you are paying half the flat per-ticket fee plus processing. At that low price point the two land within pennies of each other per ticket, so the deciding factors become where the fees go and which product your volunteers find easier to run on the night. This is the recurring theme with small events: the closer the maths, the more the non-price factors matter.
Which should you pick?
For a one-off small event with cheap tickets, either platform is a sound, low-cost choice, and the deciding factor is often the feel of the product and, for Humanitix, where the fees end up. For events with mid-price or premium tickets, Ticket Tailor's flat fee usually keeps more money in the room, because it does not scale with what you charge. Be honest with yourself about your average ticket price and run both through the numbers above.
There is a third pattern worth flagging, because neither of these tools is built for it. If you run many events across the year, or high volumes at higher prices, any per-ticket fee (flat or percentage) keeps ticking up with every ticket you sell. That is the point at which a fixed monthly subscription can become the cheaper structure. eventcloud charges a flat 125 dollars per user per month with zero per-ticket fees and unlimited events and tickets, and payments land straight in your own Stripe account. For a single small charity raffle that is overkill, and Ticket Tailor or Humanitix will cost you less. For a busy events team running summits and conferences all year, the maths tips the other way.
Whichever way you lean, decide on your real ticket prices and volumes, not on a headline rate. If you want to see how a flat model stacks up against per-ticket pricing, our Ticket Tailor comparison lays it out in full.
