A ten-person events team pays nothing at all on Eventbrite, Humanitix or Ticket Tailor, because those platforms charge per ticket and not per colleague. On a per-user platform it pays for every seat: about $1,250 per user per year on eventcloud's annual licence, and roughly $499 a seat each month on Bizzabo. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how many tickets those ten people sell.
That is the honest answer, and it is more interesting than it sounds, because the two pricing models charge you for opposite things. One charges you for staff. The other charges you for success. Most buyers compare the wrong one against the wrong one and conclude the market is confusing.
What a ten-person team actually pays before selling a ticket
Here is the year-one seat cost across the platforms a mid-market organiser usually shortlists, with the per-ticket cost alongside it so the two models can be seen together. Figures are US, for a $50 ticket, and were re-checked in August 2026.
| Platform | How the team is charged | Ten people, year one | Cost per ticket on top |
|---|---|---|---|
| eventcloud | Flat subscription per user | $1,250 per user per year on the annual licence | No platform fee. Card processing runs on your own Stripe account, roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents |
| Bizzabo | Per seat each month, billed annually, three-seat minimum | Bizzabo lists a seat at about $499 a month | Quoted separately. Onsite and badge modules are paid add-ons |
| Swoogo | Flat annual licence banded by user count | Eight users reported at about $24,000 to $26,000. Ten is above the published band, so quote only | No per-registration fee |
| Cvent | Annual licence, not primarily by user | Reported from about $20,000 to $79,000, plus implementation | About $7 to $12 per registrant per event |
| Eventbrite | Team members are not charged | Nothing | About $5.20 on a $50 ticket, card processing included |
| Humanitix | Team members are not charged | Nothing | About $3.79 on a $50 ticket, card processing included |
| Ticket Tailor | Team members are not charged | Nothing | A flat fee per ticket, with your own payment gateway on top |
Eventbrite's rate comes from its own organiser pricing: 3.7% plus $1.79 in service fees per paid ticket, with 2.9% payment processing calculated on the order total rather than the face value, which is why the real figure is $5.20 and not the $5.09 most comparison tables print. Humanitix's US rate is 5% plus $1.29 and is inclusive of card fees. Note that Humanitix's marketing page still shows an older, lower structure that now applies only to some currencies, so check the help centre rather than the pricing page.
The seat count is the only number on a per-user invoice, which makes it the only number worth arguing about · credit: Kindel Media / Pexels
Where the flat model starts winning
Ten seats on eventcloud's annual licence is a fixed sum. Against Eventbrite, the saving per ticket is the difference between Eventbrite's $5.20 and the roughly $1.75 your own Stripe account charges on a $50 ticket, so about $3.45 a ticket. Divide the annual seat cost by that and the crossover lands at roughly 3,600 tickets a year.
Against Humanitix the gap per ticket is narrower, about $2.04, so the crossover moves out to roughly 6,100 tickets a year.
Read those numbers honestly in both directions. A ten-person team selling 12,000 tickets a year at $50 would pay Eventbrite around $62,000 in fees and eventcloud a fixed $12,500 plus its own processing. A ten-person team selling 900 tickets a year would be considerably better off on a per-ticket platform, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Why per-user pricing has a sting the brochures skip
Flat pricing removes the punishment for growth. It introduces a different one, and it is worth naming rather than glossing.
On a per-user platform your bill tracks headcount, not revenue. Hire two more coordinators and the subscription rises by two seats whether or not you sell a single extra ticket. In a year where you grow the team faster than the programme, the per-user model is working against you, in exactly the way the per-ticket model works against you in a year where the programme grows faster than the team.
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.
Every pricing model punishes something. The only useful question is whether it punishes the thing you are trying to do more of.
There is a second, subtler effect. Charging per seat creates a quiet incentive to share logins, which is how audit trails rot and how a departed contractor keeps access to your attendee list for eighteen months. If you go per-user, budget for the seats you actually need, including the finance person who logs in twice a year for reconciliation. On eventcloud that starts at one seat and scales one at a time, which at least makes the sums arithmetic rather than a negotiation.
What "unlimited" covers, and what it does not
eventcloud's flat subscription carries unlimited events, unlimited tickets and unlimited registrations. That is the claim, and it is a real one: the subscription does not move when an event doubles.
Here is what it does not cover, stated plainly, because a claim with no edges is marketing rather than information.
It is not unlimited users. You pay per seat, from one upward, which is the entire subject of this article.
White-label branding sits in the Enterprise arrangement rather than in the Team seat price, so do not budget for it at $125 a month.
Payment processing is separate and always will be, because that money goes to Stripe rather than to us. On a $50 ticket that is roughly $1.75 whatever platform sits on top.
eventcloud does not do 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.
Stripe is the only system eventcloud talks to. If your registrations need to appear automatically in whatever your sales team runs on, that is an export and an import at your end.
How to work out your own number in ten minutes
Skip the vendor calculators and do this on paper. Count the people who genuinely need a login, not the people on the org chart. Multiply by the per-seat annual price of each platform on your shortlist. Then take your realistic ticket volume for the next twelve months, multiply it by the per-ticket cost of each per-ticket platform at your average ticket price, and put the two totals side by side.
Then run it again at 150% of that ticket volume, because that is the year you are hoping for and it is the year where the two models diverge most sharply. If the flat number wins in both scenarios, the decision is made. If it only wins in the optimistic one, you are buying an option on your own growth, which is a reasonable thing to buy as long as you know that is what you are doing.
Who this is not for
A two-person team running one small paid event a year should not be reading a per-seat price list at all. Two seats of anything, for a few hundred tickets, is worse value than a per-ticket platform with a small-organiser or charity rate, and Ticket Tailor or Humanitix will do the job for less money and less setup.
eventcloud is also the wrong shape for organisations whose delegates live inside a networking app between sessions. Attendee networking and matchmaking are not part of eventcloud, and there is no delegate community product. If that is the centre of your attendee experience, stay where you are.
And if your seat count is going to be very large, the per-user maths eventually turns against every flat platform, including this one. At that point the conversation becomes an enterprise one rather than a price-list one.
If you want to check the arithmetic against real numbers, the full price list is on our pricing page, the per-seat comparisons sit on compare/bizzabo and compare/swoogo, and the larger-team arrangements are on enterprise.
