How to set up tiered ticket pricing (early bird, GA, VIP).

Tiers give people a reason to buy now instead of next week. An early bird price rewards the fans who commit first, and that early money tells you whether the event is on track while there’s still time to push harder on promotion.

Tiers also let one event serve different budgets. Someone who wants the cheapest way in and someone who wants a drink token and a spot near the front are both happy, and you collect more per head from the people who want more.

The catch is that too many tiers confuse buyers. If someone has to compare five options to work out which one they need, some of them will close the tab. Keep the choices short and the names obvious.

A few setups cover almost every event:

• Early bird + GA. The default for gigs, club nights and community events. Early bird is a limited number of tickets at a lower price; GA is everything else.
• GA + VIP.Good when you have something real to offer at the top end: reserved standing area, a meet and greet, merch, a drink included. Don’t sell a VIP ticket that’s just a GA ticket with a bigger number on it.
• Early bird + GA + VIP. Works for larger shows and festivals where the audience is big enough to fill all three.
• Staged pricing (tier 1, tier 2, tier 3). The same ticket getting more expensive in steps as the date gets closer. Each step is its own ticket type with its own window and allocation.

If you’re still working out the actual numbers, our guide on how to price event tickets walks through costs, break-even and what similar events charge.

On Jamrats, every ticket type has its own price, capacity, max per order, and an optional sales start and end time. Those four settings do most of the work.

For early bird, the sales window is the key setting. Set an end date on the early bird ticket type and it stops selling on that date, with no need to remember to switch it off. For staged pricing, set tier 2 to start when tier 1 ends so there’s no gap.

Capacity matters just as much. Early bird usually works best as a fixed allocation, something like 10 to 20 percent of your room. When it’s gone, it’s gone, and as a tier gets close to selling out, buyers see how many are left. That’s a nudge you don’t have to write a post about. Keep the capacities across all tiers within what your venue can actually hold.

Then set a max per order on the cheap tiers so one person can’t buy twenty early birds for their whole group chat. A limit of four to six covers most friend groups. VIP can often be lower.

If you need a quick discount for a specific group, like volunteers or a partner’s mailing list, that’s usually a job for a coupon instead of another tier.

Use a tier when the lower price is public and anyone can get it. Use a coupon when the discount is for specific people.

Jamrats coupons can be a percentage or a flat amount, applied per order or per ticket, and you can restrict a code to certain ticket types. So you can hand a performer’s friends a code that only works on GA, without touching your VIP pricing. A public early bird tier, on the other hand, shows up on the event page for everyone and does its job as marketing.

One thing to avoid: stacking a big public discount code on top of an early bird tier. You end up selling the cheapest possible ticket to the people who would have paid full price anyway.

The Jamrats fee is a flat $0.99 per paid ticket, whatever the tier costs. You choose who pays it per ticket type. By default you absorb it, so buyers see one clean price. You can switch any ticket type to pass the fee on to the buyer instead.

Because it’s set per ticket type, you can mix them. A common setup is to absorb the fee on early bird and GA, where a round price matters most, and pass it on for VIP, where an extra few cents on a premium ticket goes unnoticed.

Card processing is charged separately by Stripe at the standard rate for your country and comes out of each sale. The full breakdown is on our pricing page.