Free Ticketing
What free ticketing platforms charge instead, and the ways to pay little or nothing for Chobble Tickets
"Free ticketing" can mean three different things. It can describe software that costs nothing to run, a plan that charges the organiser nothing, or tickets sold with nothing added to the price. A platform can be free for the organiser and still take money from the buyer.
This guide describes how ticketing platforms with no price pay for themselves, and it lists the ways to pay Chobble less, or nothing at all.
How ticketing platforms with no price pay for themselves
A platform that charges some organisers nothing still has an income. The reviewed models fall into three groups:
- Buyer contributions. Zeffy charges nonprofits no subscription and no fee per ticket. Each buyer is asked for an optional contribution at checkout. The request appears twice, and about 60% of donors leave one.
- Fees on paid tickets. Eventbrite publishes events for free, and free events carry no fees. Paid tickets in the UK cost 6.95% + £0.59 each.
- Limited free plans. Some providers cap what a free plan can sell, or hold features back for paid tiers. The fee disguise guide collects the patterns, from free-event headlines to buyer-paid fees.
Each figure comes from a comparison page that records the date it was checked. "Free" describes the organiser's invoice, not the buyer's receipt.
What Chobble Tickets charges
Chobble Tickets has no free plan. Its income comes from prepaid managed hosting, at £50 a year or £5 a month.
Nothing is added to a sale. There is no per-ticket platform fee, no feature tiers, and no charge that rises with volume. Ticket income goes straight to the organiser's own Stripe, Square or SumUp account. Chobble is a community interest company funded by those annual fees, so its income does not change with what an event sells.
Free listings behave like paid ones minus the payment. A listing priced at zero needs no payment provider, takes sign-ups with capacity and questions, and records no booking fee. Hosting is still prepaid, so a site used only for free events costs the same as any other.
Paying Chobble less, or nothing
- A trial month. A free month of managed hosting is available to anyone who asks through the contact page. The trial site has every feature switched on.
- The community rate. Charities, community groups, artists and musicians pay half the annual price, £25 a year. The discount applies to annual billing, not to monthly billing.
- Self-hosting. The complete product is published under the AGPL-3.0 licence, so the software costs nothing. A self-hosted operator pays instead for a server, an email provider and payment processing. The hosting page and the deployment guide set out the options.
- Read-only after a term. If a prepaid term ends without renewal, the site stays online in read-only mode for 24 months, with exports and migration available and nothing owed for the read-only months.
The open source ticketing platforms guide compares that licence with the terms of other self-installable products, and host your own ticket site covers running ticketing on infrastructure you control.
Related guides
- The cheapest ticket sales system compares a year of costs across the reviewed providers
- Flat-rate ticketing explains prices that stay independent of sales
- Ticket sales with no per-attendee fees lists providers that take nothing from each ticket