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Event organisers

Every ticket you sell pays a toll. The checkout could be yours.

Whether you run a festival, a race series or a town's summer programme, the platform's fee is attached to each sale. Put your prices up, add a date, sell out faster, and the toll rises with you.

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The usual stack behind an event

One platform tends to sit at the centre, with smaller subscriptions gathered around it over the years.

Ticketing or entry platformA fixed fee per ticket, a share of the ticket price, or both. Shown to the buyer as a service fee or absorbed by you.
Email and text toolPriced by contacts, so your list of past attendees costs more to keep each year.
Volunteer and crew schedulingPer user or per event, used intensely for a few weeks and paid for all year.
Merchandise and add-on salesA store add-on with its own share of each sale.
Forms, surveys and waiversPer response or per month, usually on a plan sized for your busiest week.

Why the fee grows faster than the event

A fee that includes a share of the ticket price goes up whenever you raise prices, which means a slice of every price increase you make to cover your own rising costs is passed straight to the platform. A fixed fee per ticket behaves differently but no more kindly: it is the same amount on a child's ticket as on a full weekend pass, so it weighs heaviest on your cheapest tickets.

Adding a second event, a second day or a winter edition doubles the base the fee is charged on. The platform's cost of serving you barely moved.

Passing the fee to buyers does not make it disappear. It makes your event look more expensive at the last step of checkout, which is the step where people abandon a purchase.

What we rebuild for organisers

  • A checkout on your own domainTicket types, release waves, early-bird deadlines, access codes and group orders, priced how you decide.
  • Transfers, deferrals and refunds by your rulesThe policies you already have, applied by the system instead of by someone answering emails.
  • Entry lists and check-inStart lists, wave or session allocation, and scanning on the day from staff phones.
  • Add-ons in the same orderParking, camping, merchandise and donations in one basket rather than a second store.
  • One attendee record across yearsThe same person recognised from edition to edition, which is what makes loyalty pricing and returning-entrant offers possible.

What is better left rented

  • Card processingEvery system pays the processor. We connect to yours.
  • Discovery marketplacesIf a listing site brings you buyers who would never have found you, that is distribution and it is worth paying for. Keep the listing and send buyers to your own checkout where the site allows it.
  • Governing body systemsSanctioned races and competitions often require licence checks or results in a federation's own system. That stays.

The attendee list is the asset

Ask a plain question of your current platform: whose customers are these? Read the terms to see whether the platform may contact your buyers about other events, and check what an export really contains. Names and emails are the minimum. Order history, marketing consent and the answers people gave at registration are what make the list useful next year.

When the checkout is yours, the question goes away. The buyer's relationship is with the event, the data sits in a database you own, and you can take it anywhere.

Questions organisers ask

Will buyers trust a checkout that is not a well-known platform?

The checkout carries your event's name on your own domain, which is the name the buyer came for. The card details themselves are entered into the payment processor's form, so card data is handled by the processor and never by us or by you.

What about the rush when tickets go on sale?

We plan for your busiest hour rather than your average one, and we test against it before an on-sale. It is one more reason the new system runs beside the old one first: you see it take real orders before it takes all of them.

We run one event a year. Is it worth it?

Sometimes not. If your yearly fees are small, renting is the sensible choice and we will say so. Put your ticket count and fee into the calculator on this site and look at the three-year figure before deciding anything.

Can we keep selling through a marketplace as well?

Yes. Treat the marketplace as a channel and your own checkout as home. Orders that arrive through the marketplace are brought into the same attendee list so check-in works from one place.

From the blog, for event organisers

Keep reading

Free toolSoftware bill calculatorType in how you are billed, per seat, per unit or per ticket, and see what it comes to over a year and over three.Open the calculator
GuideOwning your software: the build or rent guideBuild or rent, switching risk, running two systems side by side, who maintains it, getting your data out, and when not to go custom.Read the guide
Published feesWhat the platforms chargeEvery rate read from the vendor's own pricing page, dated, and totalled over a year.See the fees
Who it's forRaces and endurance eventsYou are charged per entrant, per race, every time the calendar comes roundRead this page
Who it's forMusic festivalsA year of trading is sold in the minutes after the on-sale opensRead this page

Tell us what you pay per ticket

Your platform, the fee, and roughly how many tickets or entries a year.

No card, no call required. We reply by email.

Hiro costs about a tenth of what you pay now, quoted against your own bill. Hosting, fixes and changes included, and no per-seat fees.