A year of trading is sold in the minutes after the on-sale opens
A festival earns over one weekend and sells over one morning. Everything attached to that morning is priced by somebody else: the ticket, the pitch, the wristband, the pass at the artist gate. Each of them bills again on an audience you already sold to once.
What a festival carries on subscription
Almost none of it was chosen in one go. A ticketing deal came first, and the rest was bought a year at a time as the site grew.
Charged on the ticket, then charged again on the weekend
Tiered pricing is how a festival funds itself before the site exists: an early allocation at a low price, then the next, each tier paying for deposits on the line-up. A percentage fee rides every rung of that ladder, so the platform's share rises with a price you raised to cover artist fees. Instalment plans stretch one ticket across several charges, and the fee is commonly taken on the plan whether or not the buyer completes it.
Then the same audience is billed again on site. A cashless contract typically charges to hire the wristband, takes a share of every top-up, and takes another share of every tap at your own bars. The money being tapped is your bar takings, the traders' takings and the audience's unspent float, none of which the ticket fee had anything to do with. Reconciling the traders after the weekend is usually left to your finance office.
The third pattern is the per-edition licence. Accreditation, the site app and the gate hardware are used hard for a few weeks and paid for across the year, then set up from scratch next spring because last year's build was never yours to keep. Add a warm-up show, a second weekend or a winter indoor date, and most of those licences are bought again for work that was already done once.
What we rebuild for a festival
- The on-sale itselfA queue, tiered allocations with the counts you set, holds for press and partners, order limits per buyer, instalment plans and the name-change rules you want to enforce.
- Camping, campervans and parking as inventoryPitch types with real capacities, sold in the same order as the ticket, so the field stops selling when the field is full rather than when someone remembers to close it.
- Accreditation in one placeArtists, crew, press, traders and contractors in a single list, with guest allocations per act, approval by department, and a pass that is checked at the artist gate.
- Wristbands and gate scanningOne record per attendee from order to entry, wristbands allocated against it, lost tickets reissued at the box office, and a live count at every gate.
- Deferral and refund policy applied in bulkYour postponement and weather terms carried out on a whole tier or a whole day at once, with credits, rolled-over tickets and refunds recorded, instead of the same decision taken a thousand times in an inbox.
What stays rented, deliberately
- Card processingThe processor charges what it charges, whichever system took the order. We connect to the one you already use.
- The money rail behind cashlessTaking taps on site is card acquiring under another name, with its own settlement, chargeback and float obligations. We build the ordering, the top-up ledger and the trader reconciliation around that rail. We do not replace the rail.
- Licensing and safety systemsYour premises licence, the safety advisory group's paperwork and any capacity return the local authority requires stay exactly where they are. We produce what they ask for in the shape they ask for it.
The on-sale is the only deadline that cannot move
An on-sale has no second attempt. If the queue falls over in the minutes your audience is holding a phone, the damage is not a support ticket, it is the year. That is why we never ask a festival to move on faith. The new system takes a real but smaller release first, a warm-up show, a coach package or a campervan drop, while the current platform still runs the main on-sale, and we test the queue against the shape of your busiest minute rather than an average day.
It also means your deadline is the on-sale, not the gates. For most festivals those are months apart, and the on-sale usually lands in the quiet part of the year when the office is at its smallest. A festival that wants its next on-sale on a system it owns has to decide a long way ahead of it, and use the smaller releases in between to prove the thing. Your quote carries that date on it, so the calendar is settled before you commit to anything.
Questions festival teams ask
Can it hold up when the on-sale opens?
That is the question we design for, so we plan against your busiest minute rather than a daily average, put a real queue in front of it, and load it before anything goes live. It is also why a smaller release runs on the new system first. You watch it take real orders before it takes the ones that matter.
What happens to cashless if we own the software?
The payment rail stays. What you would own is everything wrapped around it: top-ups tied to the attendee record, bar and trader menus, the takings by outlet, the trader settlement run and the reclaim on unspent balances. Those are the parts currently charged as a share of your own bar.
Who handles artist guest lists, crew and press passes?
Your production office does, in the same system as the public tickets. Each act gets an allocation, the tour manager submits names, your department heads approve, and the pass is checked at the gate against one list. Nothing has to be exported into a separate accreditation product the week of the build.
Our festival is small and sells out anyway. Should we bother?
Often not, and we would rather say so. A sell-out does not change the arithmetic; the size of the yearly bill does. Put your ticket fee, the share of face value and the wristband terms into the calculator on this site, then look at the same sum across the length of a typical contract. If it is small, stay where you are and spend it on the line-up.
From the blog, for music festivals
- Who owns your festival's audience list between editions?September 22, 2026 · Who holds a festival's audience data between editions, what a real export has to contain beyond email addresses, and how consent and history carry over.
- How are tiered ticket releases priced, and what does the platform charge on each?September 21, 2026 · How festival tier pricing works: allocation sizes, the trigger that opens the next rung, and how per-ticket and percentage fees ride every tier.
Keep reading
Send us your on-sale and cashless terms
The fee per ticket, the share of face value, what the wristband contract takes, and the licences you pay per edition.
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.