Over three years, with 20% growth a year and a $50 ticket, a conference starting at 500 tickets pays roughly $9,456 to Eventbrite, $6,898 to Humanitix, $6,935 to eventcloud and $4,732 to Ticket Tailor. Start at 5,000 instead and the order flips hard: $94,559, $68,978, $47,320 and $35,600, with eventcloud cheapest. The rate never changed. Only the volume did.
That is the whole answer, and it is the reason a single-year price comparison is close to useless for anyone whose event is growing. A percentage fee and a flat subscription are not two prices for the same thing. They are two different shapes, and shapes only reveal themselves over time.
What does each platform charge per ticket right now?
All figures re-verified on 26 September 2026 from each vendor's own published pricing, in US dollars, on a $50 paid ticket.
Eventbrite charges 3.7% plus $1.79 per paid ticket as its service fee, plus 2.9% payment processing on the total order. Its help centre is explicit that processing is calculated on the order including the service fee, so when you pass fees to the buyer the two compound slightly. On a $50 ticket with fees passed on, that is about $5.20 all in. Free events are free.
Humanitix publishes a US rate of 5% plus $1.29 per paid ticket in its help centre, which is the same money as the 2.1% plus $0.99 booking fee and 2.9% plus $0.30 card fee shown on its marketing page, just bundled differently. That is $3.79 on a $50 ticket. No subscription, no sign-up fee.
Ticket Tailor charges a flat $0.85 per ticket on pay as you go, dropping into a published credit table if you prepay, and it never touches the payment. You connect your own Stripe, PayPal or Square, so card costs are yours directly: 2.9% plus $0.30 on their own published example. Call it $2.60 all in per $50 ticket at the pay-as-you-go rate.
eventcloud charges $125 per user per month, or $1,250 per user per year if you pay annually, which works out at ten months rather than twelve. That subscription carries unlimited events, unlimited tickets and unlimited registrations. Payments run through your own Stripe account, so the card cost is the same $1.75 per $50 ticket that a Ticket Tailor organiser pays, and it goes to Stripe rather than to us.
Cvent and Bizzabo are in the table by absence. Cvent publishes no monetary pricing at all, only two named tiers behind a quote form. Bizzabo publishes $499 per user per month with a three-user minimum, which is $17,999 a year, but publishes nothing about per-ticket or processing costs, and that page has not been edited since June 2024.
What is the three-year bill?
The scenario: a $50 ticket, one ticket per order, volume growing 20% a year, one eventcloud user seat. A 500-ticket start means 500 then 600 then 720, which is 1,820 tickets over three years. A 5,000 start means 18,200. A 50,000 start means 182,000. Totals are platform fees plus card processing, rounded to the nearest dollar.
| Starting volume, year one | Tickets over three years | Eventbrite | Humanitix | Ticket Tailor | eventcloud, one user |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | 1,820 | $9,456 | $6,898 | $4,732 | $6,935 |
| 5,000 | 18,200 | $94,559 | $68,978 | $47,320 | $35,600 |
| 50,000 | 182,000 | $945,592 | $689,780 | $473,200 | $322,250 |
Read the eventcloud column down and then read any other column down. Three of the four numbers roughly multiply by ten each time you drop a row, because the fee is attached to tickets. The fourth grows too, but only because Stripe's cut grows: the subscription part of it is $3,750 in all three rows. Same software, same price, whether you sold 1,820 tickets or 182,000.
Three years is where the shape of a pricing model stops being theoretical · credit: photoGraph / Pexels
Why does one line climb and the others do not?
Because a percentage fee is not a price for software. It is a share of your revenue, collected by a company that did not book the venue, did not sell the sponsorship and did not answer the phone at 11pm the night before doors.
That is not an accusation of bad faith. The model has real advantages: no upfront cost, no commitment, and a platform that only earns when you do. For an organiser running one 200-person event a year, that alignment is genuinely the right deal, and the table above says so plainly at the smallest row.
The problem is that the alignment stops being alignment once you succeed. Growth on a percentage platform means every improvement you make to your event, every extra attendee your marketing earns, every price rise you nervously push through, is also a raise for your ticketing vendor. Nothing about the software got better. You did.
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.
At what point does a flat subscription actually win?
You can work out the crossover exactly, and it is more useful than any marketing claim. Compare the annual subscription against the fee per ticket the other platform charges beyond the card cost you would pay either way.
Against Eventbrite, one eventcloud seat over three years breaks even at roughly 1,090 tickets in total. Against Humanitix, roughly 1,840 tickets. Against Ticket Tailor, roughly 4,410 tickets, because Ticket Tailor's flat $0.85 is genuinely low and it never takes a percentage.
Which is why the top row of the table is honest and uncomfortable: at 1,820 tickets over three years, eventcloud is third of four. Humanitix comes in $37 cheaper and Ticket Tailor is $2,200 cheaper. If your event is small and staying small, say so to yourself, and buy accordingly. The flat model does not win everywhere and pretending otherwise would just make the rest of this article less believable.
What would change these numbers?
Five things, in rough order of how much they move the total.
Ticket price. Percentage components scale with price. On a $200 ticket the Eventbrite and Humanitix lines climb sharply, the Ticket Tailor per-ticket fee does not move at all, and the subscription does not either. The gap widens in favour of flat pricing.
Tickets per order. This table assumes one. Real conferences sell in twos and threes, which spreads the fixed components across more tickets and shaves the per-order card charge. It helps every platform, and it helps the percentage ones least.
Users. eventcloud is priced per user, and that is the honest catch in its column. Three people needing logins means three seats, so $3,750 becomes $11,250 over three years, and the break-even against Ticket Tailor moves out past 13,000 tickets. Count your seats before you compare.
Prepaying. Ticket Tailor's credit table takes its per-ticket rate down to about $0.43 at 5,000 credits. Its published table stops at 20,000 credits, so the 50,000 row above uses the pay-as-you-go rate rather than a price nobody publishes.
Growth rate. 20% is deliberately modest. At 40% a year the three-year ticket count from a 5,000 start is 24,200 rather than 18,200, and every percentage line stretches with it.
Do charities and nonprofits change the answer?
Substantially, and this is the part most comparisons skip. Ticket Tailor publishes a 50% discount for registered charities on both its credit and pay-as-you-go rates, plus a 20% "business for good" rate for CICs, B Corps, PTAs and nonprofits, though it states clearly that discounts are discretionary and can be withdrawn. Humanitix runs a reduced US rate of 3.9% plus $1.29 for registered charities, nonprofits and schools, applied per event and per account on application with evidence. Eventbrite offers discounted fees on donation tickets and says qualifying nonprofits get 50% off its paid marketing plan. Cvent says it extends special rates to nonprofits and publishes no terms whatsoever.
If you are a charity running a modest annual fundraiser, the discounted percentage platforms are very hard to beat and you should take the discount. Our own view on where a flat subscription does and does not make sense for that case is on the charities page.
Who this is not for
eventcloud does not run virtual or hybrid events. If most of your programme happens on a screen with a production layer behind it, Bizzabo or vFairs will serve you better.
eventcloud is also the wrong shape for a genuinely small event. Under roughly 1,500 tickets across three years, a per-ticket platform costs less, and Ticket Tailor in particular is excellent value at that size.
Finally, there is no white-label add-on to buy at any price. An organiser who needs the platform to disappear entirely behind their own brand should start at the Enterprise page rather than the standard subscription.
The short version
Compare shapes, not rates. Take your realistic three-year ticket count, multiply it by each platform's all-in per-ticket cost, and put the resulting number next to a subscription that does not move. Whichever is smaller is your answer, and for most conferences, trade shows and summits past a couple of thousand tickets a year, the line that does not move wins by a distance that grows every year.
You can see the flat line on our pricing page, and the single-year version of this comparison at three volumes in what ticketing costs at 500, 5,000 and 50,000 tickets.
