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Why we built Jamrats.
The idea started with a phone call from a friend running a 200-cap warehouse show. The platform was taking $4 per ticket on a $25 sale. Across 200 tickets, that’s $800 — the cost of paying the sound engineer twice over. The math felt wrong.
The platform tax
Marketplace ticketing platforms charge percentage fees that scale with ticket price. Most published rates land in the 5–10% range, before service fees layered on top. The math gets meaningful fast — a 400-person concert at a $40 ticket loses thousands of dollars to a platform that did the same amount of work as it would for a $4 raffle.
That percentage isn’t paying for variable cost. The platform’s server costs scale with traffic, not ticket price. The buyer’s payment processor is paid separately, often passed through at cost. So what is the percentage paying for?
In practice, it pays for the platform’s sales team, the platform’s marketing budget, and the platform’s acquisition costs for the next organizer after you. You’re subsidizing the funnel that brings competing events to compete with yours.
The flat-fee bet
A flat fee per paid ticket is a different bet. It says: we’re infrastructure, not a marketing arm. We charge for the operational unit (one ticket sold, one QR issued, one buyer email delivered) and let the price scale however the organizer wants.
The bet works if two things are true. First, infrastructure cost per ticket has to actually be flat — same database write, same email send, same QR signing pass whether it’s a $5 raffle or a $200 weekend pass. That’s true.
Second, the platform has to genuinely not be a marketing middleman. No cross-org emails. No competing events lined up next to yours in a marketplace browse. No upsell layer between you and your buyer. We picked that constraint and we mean it.
Who we're explicitly not for
Flat-fee economics don’t work for everyone. If you’re selling $5 raffle tickets at high volume, $0.99/ticket is a meaningful share — better to use a donation platform that doesn’t treat each line as a ticket. If you’re running a stadium tour, you probably need features Jamrats doesn’t have (dynamic pricing, fan verification, paperless transfer, etc.) and you’re better off at a marketplace.
Your customer list belongs to you
The other thing we changed: we don’t email your buyers. Every ticket transaction we facilitate, the buyer and the organizer come away with a 1:1 relationship that Jamrats stays out of.
CSV exports of orders, distinct customers, and their consent state are one click from any organizer dashboard. No paywall, no tier, no contract negotiation. If you leave Jamrats tomorrow, your audience comes with you.