How to avoid high ticket fees when selling online.

Almost every online ticket sale carries some mix of three costs.

• Platform fee. What the ticketing company charges for its software. It might be a percentage of the ticket price, a fixed amount per ticket, or both added together.
• Service fee on the buyer.Some platforms add a separate charge at checkout that the buyer pays on top of the ticket price. Sometimes it’s the platform fee passed along; sometimes it’s an extra layer stacked on top.
• Card processing. The cost of taking the card payment itself, charged by the payment processor. This exists on every platform that takes cards. Some show it as its own line, some bundle it into one bigger fee.

Monthly subscriptions, setup fees and hardware rental are the other costs to watch for. They’re easy to miss because they don’t show up on any single ticket.

Pick your real ticket price and your expected number of tickets, then calculate the total cost per ticket on each platform, including processing. Headline rates are misleading on their own, because a percentage that looks small on a $10 ticket gets expensive on a $60 one.

Here’s a US worked example with made-up competitor numbers so you can see the method. You’re selling 300 tickets at $30.

• A hypothetical platform charging 6% takes $1.80 a ticket, or $540 for the event, before processing.
• Jamrats in the US charges a flat $0.99 a ticket, or $297 for the event.
• Stripe’s standard US card rate (about 2.9% + 30¢) adds roughly $1.17 a ticket. You’d pay something similar anywhere, so it doesn’t change the comparison much.

Double the ticket price to $60 and the percentage platform doubles to $3.60 a ticket. The flat fee stays at $0.99. Run the same sums with each platform’s published rates and your own numbers before you sign up anywhere.

For most paid events, a flat fee is cheaper once tickets cost more than a few dollars, because your work and the platform’s work are the same whether a ticket costs $15 or $150. A percentage charges you more just for pricing higher.

The exception is very cheap tickets. If you’re selling $3 raffle entries, any fixed per-ticket fee is a big share of the price, and a different tool might suit you better.

Jamrats charges a flat $0.99 per paid ticket, or 50¢for events with a capacity of 200 or fewer, and there’s no monthly or setup fee. Stripe’s processing is charged at the standard rate for your country, and we don’t mark it up. The full breakdown is on our fees page.

Passing fees to buyers protects your margin, but surprise charges at checkout annoy people and some will give up. If you pass fees on, make the final price clear early. If you absorb them, build the cost into your ticket price so you still hit your numbers.

A small flat fee makes absorbing it painless: adding a dollar or less to the price of a $25 ticket is easy, and buyers see one clean number. On Jamrats, absorbing is the default, and you can switch any ticket type to pass the fee on instead. Some organizers absorb on general admission and pass it on for VIP. Our pricing page shows what buyers see either way.

Card readers, dedicated scanners and ticket printers make sense for a venue running shows every week. For most organizers they’re a cost that sits in a drawer between events. Phones can do the job at the door: buyers bring a QR code in their email, and staff scan it with an app or a browser.

Check the same way for monthly plans. A subscription that makes sense at 20 events a year can be your biggest cost if you run three. For a wider look at what ticketing tools cost, see how much event ticketing software costs.