The Cheapest Ticket Sales System

The short answer

Card processing is a cost on every provider, because a card payment carries a fee wherever it is taken. Stripe's UK rate of 1.5% + 20p a payment comes to £500 on this example if every ticket is paid for separately, and less when buyers pay for several tickets at once. Some providers charge on top of processing and some include it in one combined rate, so the tables below say which is which.

Three managed plans charge nothing beyond processing: tickts Starter, SumUp Online Store and Dandelion before its requested contribution. Every other provider charges more, and the rest of this guide measures how much.

Chobble Tickets managed costs £50 a year on top of processing, so it is not the cheapest managed service: the three plans above charge nothing, and Event Schedule Pro is about £40. The £50 is the lowest managed price that includes white-label branding, an organiser-owned domain and a full API, which is the connection other software uses to read and change event and booking data, without moving to a higher tier.

The cheapest way to run the software yourself is Chobble Tickets, at about £9 a year. It compiles to an edge script with nothing running between requests, so its hosting bill is Bunny's $1 a month account minimum, while every other self-hostable product reviewed here needs an always-on server costing £56 to £104 a year.

Where the break-even falls

Chobble Tickets costs £50 a year plus the same payment processing an organiser would pay anyway. Against a provider that charges a fee on each ticket, £50 buys back that fee after a set number of tickets.

These figures use £20 tickets and one ticket per payment. A cheaper ticket moves every percentage-based row further out, and a dearer one brings it closer. Where a provider's rate includes card processing, the break-even counts only what the rate charges above Stripe's 50p on a £20 ticket.

An organiser selling 40 tickets a year at £20 pays less on most of these than on any provider with an annual fee. An organiser selling 1,000 pays less on the flat fee than on all of them.

Providers that charge nothing themselves

These options leave the organiser paying only for payment processing, or for the infrastructure the software runs on.

Self-hosting replaces a provider's fee with a server bill and the work of running it. The size of that bill depends mostly on what the software needs to run, which is the next section.

Where an edge script is different

Chobble Tickets compiles to a single JavaScript file that runs as a Bunny Edge Script. Nothing runs between requests, so there is no monthly server to rent.

Bunny charges $0.20 per million requests and $0.02 per 1,000 seconds of processor time, with no fixed monthly fee. Selling 1,000 tickets, and the browsing around those sales, is a long way below a million requests. No site Chobble hosts has used more than £0.20 of Bunny resources in total across several months.

What a self-hoster pays is therefore the account minimum rather than the usage. Bunny bills $1 a month when an account with active zones uses less than that, which is about £9 a year. Bunny's database is billed by what it stores and does rather than by the hour, and was in public preview when checked on 11 August 2026.

Deno Deploy, the other documented option, has a free tier covering 1 million requests and 20 GB of outbound traffic a month, with its first paid plan at $20 a month.

What decides which of these an organiser can use is the software, not the host. Revel needs an always-on Django server with PostgreSQL and Redis, pretix is a Python application with a database, and FooEvents and EventPrime need a WordPress site, which is itself an always-on server. Those products start from the £56 to £104 a year above; a Chobble Tickets edge deployment costs about £9.

Providers that charge on each ticket or booking

The first table lists providers whose charge sits on top of card processing, so processing is still to pay on each figure. The second lists providers whose rate includes processing, so each figure there covers the whole year.

Two of these rows are not options for a UK organiser. Ticketted's FAQ says the platform is for events in Australia, and QRTicket is German-language only. Their rates are converted to pounds so the charges can be read beside the rest.

DICE, Resident Advisor, Ticketmaster and Ticketek publish no general rate schedule, so none of them has a row. Third-party estimates of around 10% put DICE and Resident Advisor near £2,000 on this example and Ticketmaster near £4,500, and a typical Ticketek service and handling fee of about A$8 a transaction is near £4,000. Ticketek also sells mainly for large venues in Australia and New Zealand.

What the cheapest options include

The options that charge about £100 a year or less are not the same product. This table sets them beside Chobble Tickets on what the organiser can read, run, brand and move, using the classifications recorded on each comparison page.

The self-hosted rows let an organiser read the code, run it on a server they control, and keep their own domain and branding, which is what Chobble Tickets allows as well. That is why the claim below is about the combination rather than about published source alone.

What each asks in return differs. Revel asks only for the server. Pretix Community leaves the enterprise plugins on a paid edition, and Hi.Events shows a "Powered by Hi.Events" notice until a $499 licence removes it.

Among the providers with verified records on this site, Chobble Tickets is the only managed product that combines one volume-independent price, every current feature in that price, no per-sale platform fee, and self-hosting of the same source-published product. Ticket income goes straight to the organiser's own Stripe, Square or SumUp account, and the database and event setup can be downloaded and exported and taken to another host.

Some costs sit outside the fee. A provider that lists events in a public marketplace can market other organisers' events to attendees, and a provider that holds ticket money pays it out on its own schedule rather than as each sale clears.