How to Sell Tickets Without Eventbrite Fees

Ticketing platforms solve a real problem: they take money from strangers on the internet and give you a way to check who paid. For a 2,000-capacity show that's worth paying for. For a 90-capacity Thursday where most of the room already knows you, the fee is buying very little.

What the fees actually are

On published US rates as of August 2026 — check current pricing, because these change:

• Eventbrite — around 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket, plus roughly 2.9% payment processing. On a $12 ticket that's approximately $2.30.

• DICE — a booking fee commonly in the 10-15% range, built into the price the fan sees.

• Ticket Tailor — around $0.75 per ticket on pay-as-you-go plus card processing, with cheaper prepaid tiers.

Across 80 tickets at $12, the first of those is about $185. That's usually more than the promotion budget for the show.

Who pays it is a separate question. Pass fees to the buyer and your $12 ticket displays at $14.30, which affects conversion. Absorb them and it comes out of the night. Either way somebody pays.

What you're paying for, honestly

Discovery (limited — most small-show traffic comes from the bands, not the platform), payment processing, a scannable ticket, a door app, and a customer service layer. For a local show, the genuinely load-bearing items are payment processing and the scanner.

The direct alternative

Sell tickets yourself and collect the money the way you already do — cash, bank transfer, whatever payment app your scene uses. Issue each buyer a QR ticket. Scan them at the door. You've replicated the two parts that mattered and kept the $185.

The trade-offs are real and worth stating: no marketplace discovery, no chargeback protection, and you handle refunds personally. For a room where most attendees found the show through the bands, those are cheap trade-offs. For a show relying on strangers finding it, they aren't.

What a direct setup needs to do

• Issue tickets in batches with unique codes, so each one scans once.

• Work at the door on a phone, offline-tolerant, operated by whoever's on the door rather than by you.

• Handle walk-ups, because a third of your room decides at 9pm. Selling and admitting in one action matters more than it sounds.

• Show a live count so you know the room, and flag duplicates so a screenshotted ticket doesn't get in twice.

• Carry the guest list, because comps and guests are the same door problem. See running the door.

Do the maths for your own show

Musavise's ticket fee calculator compares published platform fees against selling direct, at your price and volume, with no account needed.

If it comes out in favour of direct, the ticketing tool issues QR tickets, prints them, gives whoever's on the door a scanner link that needs no account, and handles walk-up sales and the guest list on the same screen — with your first ticketed show free. We never touch the money: you collect it yourself, which is exactly why there's no per-ticket fee to take.

All of it lives in one free Musavise account — free means free, within honest limits, and your data exports whenever you want it. Create your free account; it takes about two minutes.