How to price event tickets: a practical framework.

List every cost the event creates, even the ones you’re tempted to call “free” because a friend is helping. The usual lines:

• Venue hire, or the minimum bar spend the venue asks for.
• Talent: artist fees, speaker fees, travel and accommodation.
• Production: sound, lights, staging, a technician, security.
• Marketing: ads, posters, design.
• Everything else: insurance, permits, staff, a float for surprises.

Then add the per-ticket costs. On Jamrats that’s a flat $0.99 Jamrats fee per paid ticket (50¢ if your event’s total capacity is 200 or fewer), plus Stripe’s standard card processing rate for your country. There’s no percentage fee from Jamrats, no monthly fee and no setup fee.

Now pick a realistic sales number. Not capacity: the number you would bet on. For a new night, half to two-thirds of capacity is a sensible planning figure. Your fixed costs divided by that number, plus the per-ticket costs, is the lowest average price that doesn’t lose money. Anything below it needs a sponsor, a bar deal or a good reason.

Your costs set the floor. Your audience sets the ceiling. Look at what similar events in your area charge: same genre or topic, similar venue size, similar draw. Note the range, not just the average. If comparable nights sit between $15 and $25 and your floor is $18, you have room. If your floor is $40, either the budget needs another look or the event has to be clearly bigger than the comparison.

Price also signals quality. A workshop that’s much cheaper than the alternatives can look less serious, and a gig priced well above the scene norm needs a headliner to justify it. Ask a few people in your target audience what they’d expect to pay before you publish. It takes ten minutes and saves guessing.

Think about tax at this stage too. Each event on Jamrats has its own tax settings, and buyers get a receipt, but Jamrats doesn’t file or pay tax for you. Decide whether your advertised price includes tax, and check with an accountant if you’re not sure what applies where you are.

Round numbers read better on posters and in conversation. “Twenty quid” or “twenty-five bucks” is easier to pass along than $23.50.

One price for everyone leaves money on the table at both ends. Some people would pay more for a better experience, and some would commit early for a small saving. Tiers let you serve both. A common setup:

• Early bird. A limited allocation at a lower price, closing on a set date or when it runs out. It rewards your core fans and gives you early cash-flow signal.
• General admission. Your main price, set from the framework above.
• VIP or premium. Something genuinely extra: early entry, a reserved area, merch, a meet-and-greet.

On Jamrats each ticket type has its own price, capacity, max per order and sales start and end times, so an early bird tier closes itself and GA takes over without you touching anything. When a tier gets close to selling out, buyers see how many are left. Keep early bird allocations small enough that the “going fast” moment arrives quickly. For more on structuring tiers, read tiered pricing for event tickets.

You choose per ticket type whether you absorb the Jamrats fee or pass it to the buyer. By default you absorb it: the buyer sees $25 and pays $25 (before any tax). Passing it on shows the fee as its own line at checkout, so the buyer pays the ticket price plus the fee.

Absorbing usually makes sense when your price is a round number you’ve already advertised, or when you want the cleanest possible checkout. Passing it on makes sense on low-margin tiers, where a flat fee is a bigger share of the price. Because it’s set per ticket type, you can mix: pass it on for a cheap early bird and absorb it on VIP, for example.

Either way, the fee is flat, so it doesn’t grow as your price goes up. The fees page shows the exact numbers for your country.

Coupons are useful when they do a specific job. Blanket discounts mostly teach your audience to wait for a code. Good jobs for a coupon:

• A code for a partner’s mailing list, so you can see whether the partnership sells.
• A group deal: a flat amount off per order once people buy together.
• A thank-you for last season’s regulars.
• A late push on a slow tier, restricted to that ticket type only.

Jamrats coupons can be a percentage or a flat amount, applied per order or per ticket, and limited to specific ticket types. You can cap how many times a code can be used, and the coupon list shows how many times each one has been redeemed. Price the discount into your break-even: a 20% code on half your sales moves the numbers more than you’d think.

Here’s a US example with round numbers. A promoter is putting on a 250-capacity gig. Fixed costs:

• Venue: $1,200
• Talent: $1,500
• Sound and lights: $500
• Marketing: $300
• Insurance and contingency: $200

That’s $3,700 in fixed costs. GA is $25 and the promoter absorbs the Jamrats fee. Per ticket, in this US example (taxes left out to keep it simple):

• Ticket price: $25.00
• Stripe processing at the US standard rate (2.9% + 30¢): about $1.03
• Jamrats fee (US, events over 200 capacity): $0.99
• Net to the promoter: about $22.98

Break-even is $3,700 ÷ $22.98, which is 161.01, so 162 tickets, or about 65% of capacity. Every ticket after that is about $22.98 of profit, and a sell-out would clear roughly $2,045.

If the promoter passes the fee to buyers instead, each buyer pays $25.99. Stripe processing on that is about $1.05, so the net per ticket is about $23.95 and break-even drops to 155 tickets. If the venue held 200 or fewer, the small-event fee would apply instead, which lowers the per-ticket cost further.

If 65% of capacity feels like a stretch for this lineup, that tells you something useful before you’ve spent a cent: negotiate the venue, trim production, or price GA at $28. Run the numbers again until the break-even point is one you’d be comfortable betting on. Once tickets are on sale, the event dashboard shows sales by ticket type, so you can see how close you are at any point. See ticket sales features for the full set of options.