Chobble Tickets vs Seaty

Open source & flat fee Seaty alternative

Chobble Tickets is a white label ticketing platform made in the UK by a community interest company. Its source code is published under the AGPL-3.0-only licence, so anyone can read it, fork it, or run their own copy. Seaty does not publish its source code.

Seaty charges 7.2% on online card payments, with card processing included, a £0.50 minimum per order, and no fees on cash, invoice, box office or free tickets. A £15 ticket processed online costs £1.08 in Seaty fees and nothing in Chobble platform fees. Chobble Tickets charges £50/year or £5/month whatever the volume, and adds no fee to any ticket, though the organiser pays their own Stripe, Square or SumUp processing separately.

Pricing comparison

Seaty has no subscription and no setup fee. Its income comes from a percentage charged on online card payments processed through Seaty: 7.2% of the order value, with a minimum of £0.50 per order. Card processing is included in that percentage. Cash payments, bank transfers, box office sales, and free tickets carry no fee at all.

The fee is a percentage of each order rather than a fixed amount per ticket, so a customer buying four tickets in one transaction is charged once on the total. For each event the organiser chooses whether to absorb the fee into the ticket price or pass it on to the buyer at checkout. Connecting your own Stripe account drops the percentage to 4.5%, and Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p in the UK) then applies separately.

Chobble Tickets is a flat £50/year or £5/month, with no per-ticket platform fees. Charities, community groups, artists and musicians pay £25/year on the annual plan. Payment processing is charged by your own Stripe, Square, or SumUp account, and every current feature is included at the one price.

Because Seaty's 7.2% includes card processing and Chobble's fee does not, the fair comparison is 7.2% per order against £50 a year plus your own Stripe processing. At £15 a ticket and Stripe's 1.5% + 20p, the two cross over at around 76 tickets, or about £1,150 of sales a year. Above that, the flat Chobble price costs less; below it, Seaty's percentage costs less.

Cheaper tickets need a higher volume to reach the break-even point, because the per-ticket saving is smaller. Dearer tickets reach it sooner. Free tickets cost nothing on either platform, since Seaty only charges on online card payments and Chobble only charges its annual fee.

Interactive cost calculator

Drag the sliders to see how costs compare at different volumes:

When you get your money

This is one of the larger differences between the two platforms.

With Seaty's own payment processing, ticket income is collected by Seaty and held until after your event has finished. The terms say Seaty pays the net funds to the organiser no sooner than four days after the event end date, less any applicable fees, and Seaty may earn interest on the held funds in the meantime. Seaty may advance a portion of funds before that date on terms it sets.

Connecting your own Stripe account changes the timing. Buyers pay Stripe directly through Stripe Connect, so funds reach your bank on Stripe's own payout schedule during the ticket campaign rather than after the event. The 4.5% Seaty fee then applies, alongside Stripe's processing.

Chobble Tickets never holds ticket money. Buyers pay your own Stripe, Square, or SumUp account, so payouts follow that provider's schedule from the first sale onwards.

Feature comparison

Seaty is built for theatres, schools, societies and production groups, and covers what happens before, during and after a sale rather than the sale alone. It has a broader feature set than Chobble Tickets in several areas that matter to that audience. Here is the breakdown:

Both platforms share some features

• Online ticket sales with card payments
• Stripe as a payment option, paying the organiser directly when connected
• Free events with no payment setup required
• Event capacity limits that mark tickets as sold out when reached
• Multiple ticket types per event, including a mix of paid and free
• Discount and promo codes
• Complimentary tickets through a 100% discount
• QR codes on every ticket, and barcode scanning for check-in
• Email confirmations to attendees after booking
• Refunds processed from the admin panel
• CSV export of your sales and attendee data
• Sales reporting by ticket type and event
• Apple Pay and Google Pay at checkout
• Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes on tickets
• A REST API for your own data, and outbound webhooks for real-time notifications
• Branding on your booking pages, emails and scanning app with your own images and colours
• One page per organisation listing its upcoming events

Seaty has features Chobble Tickets doesn't

• Reserved seating - a seating plan tool that assigns seats to buyers as they buy online, holds specific seats back for VIPs, groups and the box office, and updates live during booking
• Tours and multi-venue series - one page covering several dates or venues under a single tour
• Merchandise - items with variations sold alongside tickets, with scannable vouchers for redemption
• Immutable order audit log - every action on an order, from emails sent and opened to refunds, payments, transfers and date swaps, kept in a log that cannot be edited
• Order and ticket flags - any ticket can be flagged for follow-up with its own comment thread and priority
• Member ticket requests and quotas - members request tickets the committee approves or denies, with a running balance tracked per person, early access for members before the public, and reserve-before-pay
• Per-customer balances and statements - part-payments recorded against a person, with statements emailed to anyone who owes at the end of a run
• Gift Aid - on donations and on whole admissions, with claim tracking and an HMRC export
• Surveys, forms and questionnaires - a standalone tool for post-show feedback, membership renewals, photo consent and waivers, with anonymous, confidential and identified modes, live results, and AI summaries of written answers
• In-person and box office sales - card payments taken in person through a Stripe Terminal reader, including an unattended self-service kiosk where a customer buys and prints without staff
• Thermal ticket printing - print on any 80mm ESC/POS printer through a Windows or Android print hub, with customers able to print their own at the venue
• Built-in mailshots - email past buyers with open and click tracking, Facebook (Meta) Pixel and Google Ads conversion tracking, and Google Analytics 4
• Member and cast scheduling - a rehearsal and meeting scheduler with member attendance tracking and QR check-in
• Mobile app for cast and crew - scripts, scores and sheet music, rehearsal audio and video playback with cue pins, and offline access, shared through Dropbox
• Granular team roles - permissions down to scan-only accounts and a record of who changed which settings
• Offline scanning - ticket scanning without a network connection
• Equipment leasing and on-site staff - card readers, kiosks and event-day staff supplied by Seaty as an additional service

Chobble Tickets has features Seaty doesn't

• Open source - the complete product source is published under AGPL-3.0-only with no proprietary feature tier
• Self-hosting option - run the platform on your own infrastructure without a Chobble software licence fee
• Password-derived encryption - attendee data is encrypted with a key derived from your admin password using hybrid RSA-OAEP + AES-256-GCM. A database dump and the server's environment encryption key together are still not enough to decrypt attendee data, since an attacker would also need your password
• Flat pricing - £50/year or £5/month whatever you sell, with no percentage of any ticket
• Your own custom domain - your ticket pages run on your own web address, included in the price. Seaty's pages are served from seaty.co.uk
• Public-facing website and CMS - a homepage, content pages, news posts, and a contact form with spam protection, edited from the admin panel in Markdown with custom CSS
• Custom email providers - use Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, or Mailgun so confirmations come from your domain, not the platform's
• Customisable email templates - full control over confirmation emails with Liquid syntax for a fully white-label experience
• Square and SumUp for online ticket checkout, alongside Stripe. Seaty accepts card payments online through its own gateway or your own Stripe account
• Admin API - authenticated API with API keys for full event create, edit and delete
• Pay-what-you-want pricing - let attendees choose their own price above a minimum, with no cut taken from the extra
• Deposits and balance payments - take a deposit now and the balance later
• SMS messages - text attendees about their booking
• Tiered ticket types via groups - VIP, early bird and other tiers with a shared capacity cap
• Daily/recurring events - per-date capacity with a calendar picker and holiday blackouts
• Subscribable calendar and RSS feeds - one feed listing all your events, so subscribers see new ones automatically
• Complete database backups and event setup export you can move to another Chobble Tickets host
• Community Interest Company - run by a CIC, a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit

Data ownership

Seaty stores attendee and order data on Microsoft Azure in the UK South region, and its privacy policy says personal data does not leave the United Kingdom for routine processing. Card numbers never reach Seaty's servers; payments are processed by Stripe under PCI DSS, and only a Stripe payment reference is stored. Passwords are salted and hashed, every email-and-password sign-in is followed by a one-time emailed code, and the database runs on Azure SQL with Transparent Data Encryption at rest.

Seaty acts as a data processor for the attendee data an event collects, but it is also a data controller for data it obtains from use of the platform. Its privacy policy says it may use that data "to provide you with more targeted recommendations about events we think may be of interest to you" and may send attendees "promotional emails about new products, special offers or other information". Under the default Seaty payment processing, ticket income is held by Seaty until after the event, and Seaty may earn interest on the held funds.

The data still sits on Seaty's servers in a proprietary system you cannot run yourself. If Seaty stopped operating, you would depend on your CSV exports for the data you had already downloaded.

With Chobble Tickets, attendee data is encrypted at rest with a key derived from your admin password. Only your own administrator accounts, and the optional recovery account you can enable, unlock it. The platform is open source under AGPLv3, so you can self-host it and stop depending on Chobble as your host.

Ticket income goes straight to your own Stripe, Square or SumUp account, and the database and event setup can be downloaded and exported and moved to another host.

When Seaty might be the better choice

• You run a theatre, school, society or production group and want seating, members, schedules, balances and scanning in one platform
• You need reserved seating with held seats for VIPs, groups or the box office
• You want member ticket requests, quotas and per-customer balances with part-payments and statements
• You collect Gift Aid on donations or admissions and want claim tracking and an HMRC export
• You want a built-in survey, form and questionnaire tool for post-show feedback, consent and membership renewals
• You need an immutable order audit log for a committee, treasurer or box office team
• You want in-person box office or an unattended self-service kiosk on the day
• You want card readers, kiosks or on-site staff supplied by the platform
• You sell a small enough number of paid online tickets that the 7.2% fee costs less than the yearly Chobble Tickets price plus your own processing, which is under about £1,150 of online card sales a year at £15 a ticket
• You want the platform to collect ticket money and pay you after the event rather than handling a payment account yourself

When Chobble Tickets is the better choice

• You sell more than about £1,150 of online tickets a year at £15 a ticket, where the percentage fee costs more than the flat price
• You want a price that does not change with ticket volume or value
• You want payouts to start as tickets sell, on your payment provider's own schedule, rather than after the event
• You want your ticket pages on your own domain and your own website
• Encryption and data privacy matter to you, and you want a platform that does not market to attendees
• You want to self-host the same product on infrastructure you control
• You value open source and published source code
• You want Square or SumUp for online checkout and not just Stripe
• You want deposits, pay-what-you-want pricing, or SMS messages
• You want calendar and RSS feeds, a full admin API, or webhooks for real-time notifications

Who owns Seaty?

Seaty Ltd is a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 08960314, based at 11 Brindley Place, Brunswick Square, Birmingham. The company was incorporated on 26 March 2014 as Daniel Haddon Limited and renamed Seaty Ltd on 8 June 2020. It is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZA543843. No ownership structure, investor backing, charity registration, B Corporation certification or co-operative status is described in the sources reviewed.

Chobble Tickets is run by one person as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit. All of Chobble's code is public under AGPLv3, and the platform can be self-hosted by anyone without depending on Chobble as a company.

Pricing sources

The pricing information on this page was checked on 14 August 2026 against the live Seaty fees page and its published terms. Fees may change. Check the links below for the latest figures.

• Seaty fees and pricing - 7.2% on online card payments, £0.50 minimum, no fees on cash, box office or free tickets, no subscription or setup cost
• How Seaty compares - 4.5% when you connect your own Stripe, feature comparison against Eventbrite and TicketSource
• Seaty terms of service - Seaty as commercial agent, funds held until after the event, payout no sooner than four days after the event end date, Stripe Connect alternative, service fees non-refundable
• Seaty privacy policy - Azure UK South hosting, ICO reference ZA543843, data controller and processor roles, promotional emails and event recommendations, card data handled by Stripe, Transparent Data Encryption
• Seaty developer API - REST API and signed webhooks
• Companies House: Seaty Ltd - company number 08960314, incorporated 26 March 2014, formerly Daniel Haddon Limited
• Chobble Tickets pricing
• Chobble Tickets features