No per-ticket fees
Chobble Tickets charges a flat £50/year regardless of how many tickets you sell. There is no percentage cut, no per-ticket charge, and no hidden fees.
How flat-fee ticketing works
Most ticketing platforms take a percentage of every ticket you sell, plus a fixed fee per ticket. The more tickets you sell, the more you pay. If you raise your ticket prices, your fees go up too.
Chobble Tickets works differently. You pay £50/year for managed hosting. That covers unlimited events and unlimited tickets. Money from ticket sales goes directly to your Stripe or Square account, minus only the payment processor's standard fee (1.5% + 20p per transaction in the UK).
Charities, community groups, artists, and musicians pay £25/year (50% discount). If you self-host, the software is free - you only pay Stripe's processing fees.
Why flat-fee pricing is possible
Processing a ticket costs very little. When someone books a ticket, the server stores a small amount of data, sends a confirmation email, and generates a QR code. The infrastructure cost of doing this is less than a penny per attendee.
That means the actual cost of running a ticketing platform does not go up meaningfully with each ticket sold. A platform that sells 100 tickets a month and one that sells 10,000 tickets a month have similar hosting costs. The expensive parts - building the software, maintaining it, providing support - are fixed costs that do not depend on ticket volume.
Per-ticket fees on other platforms are not driven by per-ticket costs. They are a business model choice. Percentage-based pricing lets a platform take more money from organisers who sell more tickets or charge higher prices, even though the platform's cost of processing each ticket is the same.
Chobble Tickets charges a flat annual fee because that reflects the actual cost structure: fixed costs covered by a fixed price. There is no per-ticket cost to pass on, so there is no per-ticket fee.
Chobble is a community interest company, not a venture-funded startup. Its income comes from annual fees, not from taking a cut of ticket sales. There is no advertising revenue and no data economy subsidising the price.
- Per Year
- £50
- Events
- ∞
- Tickets
- ∞
- Platform Commission
- 0%
Worked examples at different scales
These examples compare the total annual cost of Chobble Tickets against a platform charging 6.95% + £0.59 per ticket (a common rate among large UK ticketing providers). Chobble's payment processing (Stripe: 1.5% + 20p) is shown separately. The per-ticket platform's fee includes payment processing.
50 tickets per year at £10 each
| Per-ticket platform | Chobble Tickets | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual fee | £0 | £50 |
| Platform fees | £64.25 | £0 |
| Payment processing | £0 (included above) | £17.50 |
| Total fees | £64.25 | £67.50 |
| Cost per ticket | £1.29 | £1.35 |
| You keep | £435.75 | £432.50 |
At very low volumes, a per-ticket platform is slightly cheaper - £3.25 per year in this example. The breakeven point for £10 tickets is around 54 tickets per year.
500 tickets per year at £15 each
| Per-ticket platform | Chobble Tickets | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual fee | £0 | £50 |
| Platform fees | £816.25 | £0 |
| Payment processing | £0 (included above) | £212.50 |
| Total fees | £816.25 | £262.50 |
| Cost per ticket | £1.63 | £0.53 |
| You keep | £6,683.75 | £7,237.50 |
At 500 tickets, you keep £553.75 more with Chobble Tickets. The cost per ticket drops to 53p because the £50 annual fee is spread across more sales.
5,000 tickets per year at £20 each
| Per-ticket platform | Chobble Tickets | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual fee | £0 | £50 |
| Platform fees | £9,900 | £0 |
| Payment processing | £0 (included above) | £2,500 |
| Total fees | £9,900 | £2,550 |
| Cost per ticket | £1.98 | £0.51 |
| You keep | £90,100 | £97,450 |
At 5,000 tickets, you keep £7,350 more per year with Chobble Tickets. The percentage-based platform takes £9,900 in fees alone.
Why per-ticket fees add up
Per-ticket pricing creates three problems for event organisers:
Fees scale with success. If you sell more tickets or raise your prices, your platform costs go up, even though the platform does the same amount of work. A 6.95% + £0.59 fee on a £30 ticket is £2.68. Sell 1,000 of those and you have paid £2,680 in platform fees alone.
Fees are hard to predict. When your costs depend on how many tickets you sell and at what price, you cannot know your costs in advance. With a flat annual fee, your platform cost is £50 whether you sell 10 tickets or 10,000.
Fees discourage low-cost tickets. If your event charges £3 per ticket, a £0.59 fixed fee per ticket is nearly 20% of the ticket price. This pushes organisers to raise prices or absorb the cost. Chobble Tickets has no per-ticket fee, so low-price events are not penalised.
"Most stay and plays are somewhere between £1-£4 a ticket. If you add a ticket fee of £1 to it, then in some cases you're literally double the cost to the user - and if they are happy to pay that, then why should it go to the ticket platform? It's better off in your pocket."
- Elliott's Bouncy Castle Hire, who switched from Eventbrite after 12 years
"Eventbrite takes £275 per event, but Chobble is £87.50. Sure, I have to pay £50 a year for Chobble, but that cost is absorbed in less than the first event. It's literally paying for itself on the first event and still saving nearly £100."
Compare fees across platforms
Use the calculator below to enter your own ticket volume and price. It shows fees for 17+ ticketing platforms side by side.
Compare all platforms at once
Drag the sliders to see how much you keep with each platform:
What you pay
Chobble Tickets does not handle money directly. Payments go through Stripe (or Square) to your own account. Chobble never holds your revenue.
The only per-transaction cost is Stripe's standard processing fee, which is the same rate you would pay on any platform that uses Stripe. Some platforms bundle this into their own fee so it is not visible separately.
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Chobble Tickets (managed hosting) | £50/year |
| Chobble Tickets (self-hosted) | Free |
| Stripe payment processing | 1.5% + 20p per transaction |
| Per-ticket platform fee | None |
Because the infrastructure cost per ticket is less than a penny, there is no reason to charge you more when you sell more. The £50/year covers hosting, software updates, and support.
Who the flat fee works best for
The flat-fee model is cheaper for most organisers who sell more than a handful of tickets per year. It works particularly well for:
- Regular event runners who sell tickets every week or month, because the £50 cost is spread across all events
- High-volume events where per-ticket fees would add up to hundreds or thousands of pounds
- Low-price events (under £5 per ticket) where a fixed per-ticket fee would be a large proportion of the ticket price
- Charities and community groups who pay £25/year and want every pound from ticket sales to go towards their cause
If you run one small event per year with fewer than about 60 tickets, a per-ticket platform may cost less. The fee calculator above can help you check.