At 500 paid tickets a year, per-ticket platforms are usually the cheaper option and Ticket Tailor is the cheapest of the lot at roughly 425 dollars. At 5,000 it is close. At 50,000 the gap is brutal: Eventbrite would take about 182,000 dollars in service fees where a flat subscription takes 1,250. The number that matters is not the rate. It is the slope.
The two pricing models, and why only one of them has a slope
Event ticketing is sold two ways. A percentage model charges a cut of every ticket, so the vendor's revenue is a function of your attendance. A flat model charges for access to the software, so the vendor's revenue is a function of how many of your staff log in. Everything else is detail.
This matters because the two lines behave completely differently as you grow. A percentage is not a price, it is a slope. Ten thousand tickets does not cost ten times what a thousand costs on a flat plan, it costs exactly the same, and that is uncomfortable for anyone who has spent a decade assuming ticketing cost is proportional to event size.
Run the sums at three volumes, not one. The rate tells you almost nothing · credit: Kindel Media / Pexels
What the same year actually costs on each platform
The table below assumes a 50 dollar paid ticket, one organiser account, and one year of activity across however many events it takes to reach the volume. It shows platform fees only, because that is the part the platform controls. Two notes before you read it. Humanitix's figure is all-in: its 5% plus 1.29 dollars covers card processing, so nothing else gets added. Eventbrite, Ticket Tailor, Swoogo and eventcloud all sit on top of card processing charged separately, which on a 50 dollar ticket runs to roughly 1.45 to 1.75 dollars depending on the gateway. Cvent's licence is quote-based and the figure below is a commonly cited floor, not a published price.
| Platform and fee basis | 500 tickets | 5,000 tickets | 50,000 tickets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite, 3.7% plus 1.79 service fee per ticket | 1,820 dollars | 18,200 dollars | 182,000 dollars |
| Humanitix, 5% plus 1.29 per ticket, card fees included | 1,895 dollars | 18,950 dollars | 189,500 dollars |
| Ticket Tailor, 0.85 per ticket pay as you sell | 425 dollars | 4,250 dollars | 42,500 dollars |
| Swoogo, flat annual licence, one user | about 7,800 dollars | about 7,800 dollars | about 7,800 dollars |
| Cvent, licence plus 7 per registrant per event | from 23,000 dollars | from 54,500 dollars | from 369,500 dollars |
| eventcloud, flat annual licence, one user | 1,250 dollars | 1,250 dollars | 1,250 dollars |
Three of those rows climb with a straight edge and three do not move at all. That is the entire argument, laid out in twelve cells.
Where does the flat line cross the percentage line?
This is the question worth asking before you sign anything, and it takes about thirty seconds. Divide the annual subscription by the per-ticket fee. The answer is the volume at which flat becomes cheaper.
Against Eventbrite, at 3.64 dollars of service fee on a 50 dollar ticket, a 1,250 dollar annual licence pays for itself at 344 paid tickets.
Against Humanitix, at 3.79 dollars all-in, the crossover is 330 tickets.
Against Ticket Tailor, at 0.85 dollars a ticket, the crossover is 1,471 tickets, which is why Ticket Tailor remains a genuinely good answer for smaller organisers and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Note what the crossover depends on: ticket price. A percentage fee scales with price as well as volume, so a 200 dollar conference pass carries a much larger fee than a 20 dollar community ticket. Run the sum on your actual price, not on a round number, and run it on next year's attendance rather than last year's.
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.
The costs that do not appear on any pricing page
Headline rates are the honest part. The rest of the bill hides in add-ons, and this is where the enterprise platforms in particular pull away from their quoted numbers.
Onsite hardware and badging. Cvent scanner rentals commonly run 200 to 600 dollars per device per show. Swoogo prices badging separately from the core licence. If you print 3,000 badges, this is not a rounding error.
Implementation. Cvent year-one implementation is widely reported in the 5,000 to 50,000 dollar range. That is a real cost that never appears in a per-registrant comparison.
Feature tiers. Bizzabo prices white-label branding, API access, single sign-on and onsite badge printing as paid add-ons on top of a floor of roughly 499 dollars per user per month billed annually, with a three-user minimum.
Payment processing. Whoever holds the money sets the terms. Platforms that pay you out on their schedule are making float decisions with your revenue. Platforms that use your own gateway are not.
What unlimited actually means, and what it does not
"Unlimited" is a word that deserves suspicion, so here is the honest version as it applies to a flat-fee platform like ours. Unlimited covers usage: events, ticket types, tickets sold, registrations and attendees. Sell 500 or sell 50,000 and the subscription line is identical.
It does not mean unlimited users. eventcloud is 125 dollars per user per month, or 1,250 per user per year on the annual licence, from one seat upwards, so a ten-person events team is a ten-times bigger bill than a solo organiser. It does not mean every feature on every plan: white-label branding sits on Enterprise, not on the Team plan. It does not remove card processing, which Stripe charges the organiser directly. And it does not turn an in-person platform into a virtual one.
Any vendor that will not tell you where its unlimited stops is describing a marketing position rather than a product.
Who this comparison is not for
eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If most of your programme runs on a screen with a streaming and production layer behind it, Bizzabo, vFairs or Cvent will serve you better and the sums above are irrelevant to you.
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 rather than an automatic handover, which some teams find perfectly fine and others find a dealbreaker.
And if you run one small event a year, a subscription is the wrong shape entirely. Under about 350 paid tickets annually the per-ticket platforms win on pure cost, and Ticket Tailor's free tier for free events under roughly 5,000 tickets a year is very hard to beat at zero.
How to run this for your own numbers
Take three volumes: what you did last year, what you expect next year, and three times next year. Apply your current platform's fee to all three. Then apply a flat subscription to all three. If the first set of numbers grows and the second does not, you now know what your growth is currently priced at, and you can decide whether that is a trade you want to keep making.
The eventcloud pricing page has the flat figure with nothing behind it, and the Eventbrite comparison, Cvent comparison and Swoogo comparison run the same event through each model side by side.
