How much will Eventbrite and its alternatives charge on your ticket?

Every ticketing fee is built from up to three parts, and the headline number usually hides two of them:

• The service fee — the platform’s cut, usually a percentage of the ticket price. This is the number platforms advertise.
• The flat per-ticket fee — a fixed amount added to every ticket. This is the quiet one: $1.79 flat is negligible on a $100 ticket and brutal on a $10 one. If your tickets are inexpensive, the flat fee matters more than the percentage.
• Payment processing — the card fee, typically around 2.9% + 30¢. Some platforms fold it into their rate; most add it separately.

That is why the honest comparison is the total at your price point, not the advertised rate — the calculator above does exactly that. For the full playbook on fee math, payout timing, and checkout craft, see how to sell event tickets online.

Passing fees to buyers (the default on most platforms) means the fees appear at checkout on top of your ticket price. You receive your full ticket price; your $20 ticket costs the buyer $22–23.

Absorbing fees means the buyer pays exactly the advertised price and the fees come out of your payout. Cleaner for the buyer, and it changes your pricing math — the fee becomes a cost you must price in. Neither choice is wrong; what matters is running the numbers both ways before the event, not after.

Fees are not the enemy — real machinery costs money to run. A marketplace fee buys you discovery: strangers browsing Eventbrite can find your event. That is genuinely worth paying for when your audience does not know you yet.

The math changes once your sales come from channels you already own — your email list, your socials, the regulars from the last event. Then the marketplace is charging a discovery fee on traffic you generated yourself. Most independent hosts sit somewhere between, which is why it is worth comparing dedicated ticketing platforms too — see the best event ticketing platforms for where each one fits, or the direct SocialLoop vs Eventbrite comparison.

Every figure is for one paid ticket in one order, bought with a US card, in US dollars, at each company’s published US rates read on its own pricing or help page on October 11, 2026. Each row links to the page we read.

Fees include everything taken from the ticket: the platform’s own fee, card processing and any service charge. Where a platform bills card processing separately through Stripe, we use Stripe’s standard US rate of 2.9% + 30¢. Where processing is bundled into the platform’s fee (Addmi, Posh, TicketLeap’s 3% transaction fee), nothing is added.

“Host keeps” assumes the host absorbs every fee, so the guest pays exactly the ticket price. “Buyer pays” is the checkout total when the fees are passed to the buyer instead; for platforms that bill Stripe separately it adds the platform fee and the processing fee on the ticket price, and the processor may charge a few cents more on the larger total.

Eventbrite’s US fee is 3.7% + $1.79 per ticket plus 2.9% processing calculated on the total order, including the service fee when the buyer pays it. SocialLoop’s figures are the live checkout’s: a 5% platform fee on every plan and 3.4% + 30¢ card processing; when fees are passed on, a 50¢ service charge and a $1 minimum platform fee per order.

Each fee is computed exactly and rounded to the cent once, at the end. Subscriptions, sales tax and currency conversion are not included unless a row says so. Rankings count only platforms any host can use with no subscription: Zeffy (registered nonprofits only), Luma Plus (a subscription) and prepaid Ticket Tailor credits are shown but not ranked.