Eventbrite fees vs selling tickets on your own WordPress site, with the actual numbers
If you sell tickets for small events (a class, a workshop, a club night, a fundraiser), the ticketing platform's cut adds up fast. Here are the actual numbers for Eventbrite against taking payments on your own WordPress
If you sell tickets for small events (a class, a workshop, a club night, a fundraiser), the ticketing platform's cut adds up fast. Here are the actual numbers for Eventbrite against taking payments on your own WordPress site, and what you give up if you switch.
Disclosure: I build Beacon Events, a WordPress calendar plugin whose paid add-on sells tickets. The arithmetic below holds whatever you use.
What Eventbrite charges
From Eventbrite's US pricing page:
- Free events: no fees.
- Paid tickets: "3.7% + $1.79 service fee per ticket".
- On top of that: "2.9% payment processing fee per order".
- Buyers pay these fees by default, or you can absorb them.
What selling on your own site costs
If the payment goes straight through your own Stripe account, Stripe's US price is "2.9% + 30ยข per successful transaction for domestic cards", plus 1.5% for international cards. The ticketing software is a flat yearly fee or free.
The 2.9% shows up on both sides, so the real difference is Eventbrite's service fee against Stripe's 30ยข.
Per ticket
Service fee on Eventbrite against Stripe's fixed fee, one ticket per order:
| Ticket price | Eventbrite service fee | Stripe fixed fee | Difference per ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10 | $2.16 | $0.30 | $1.86 |
| $20 | $2.53 | $0.30 | $2.23 |
| $50 | $3.64 | $0.30 | $3.34 |
When buyers pay the fees, the 2.9% processing is charged on the service fee too, so a $20 ticket comes to about $23.18 at checkout.
Over a year
A studio running 40 classes a year with 25 people at $20 sells 1,000 tickets. That's about $2,530 in Eventbrite service fees, against about $300 in Stripe's fixed fees. Whether your attendees pay that difference or you do, it's roughly $2,200 a year.
What you give up
Being fair to Eventbrite, it does a few things your own site won't:
- Discovery. People browse Eventbrite for things to do. Your own site only sells to people who already found you.
- Check-in and seating. Its organizer app scans tickets at the door, and it handles reserved seating.
- Refunds and payouts. It handles refund requests and chargebacks and pays you out on its schedule. With your own Stripe account, that's between you and Stripe.
If most of your buyers find you through Eventbrite, the fee may be worth it. If they come from your own site, your newsletter or your regulars, you're paying a marketplace fee for a marketplace you don't use.
Checklist before you switch
- Open a Stripe account and send one real test payment to yourself.
- Decide your refund policy and write it on the event page.
- Make sure buyers get a confirmation email with a calendar file.
- Set a capacity for each date so you never oversell.
- Keep a printable attendee list for the door.
If you want to try Beacon Events
The calendar is free on wordpress.org, including recurring events and Google Calendar sync. The paid add-on, Beacon Events Pro, is $49 a year for one site. It takes RSVPs and sells tickets through your own Stripe account or your WooCommerce checkout, with no per-ticket fee from us. It includes a capacity per date, a waitlist, reminder emails and an attendee list you can export. It does one price per event, with no ticket tiers, no reserved seating and no scanning app yet, so it fits classes and small events better than festivals.
Demo site: https://store-safety.duckdns.org/demo/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/beacon-events/
If your numbers look different, say, a country with other fees, post them in the comments.
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes โ full credit and traffic to the original publisher.