What a ticket actually costs, and who takes what
The most common complaint about buying tickets is not the price. It is discovering the price was not the price. A £30 ticket that reaches £38.50 at the last step feels like a trick, and it usually is one — not because the fees are unjustified, but because they arrived after the decision was made.
Where the money goes on a £50 ticket
The organiser receives all £50. We take no commission, and card processing — roughly £0.90 on a £50 ticket — is ours to absorb, not theirs. Our revenue is the £2.49 service fee the buyer pays, of which about 41p is VAT and roughly £1.09 covers processing, infrastructure and support.
The organiser receives £47.00. If they absorbed the fee, you paid £50.00 flat. If they passed it on, you paid £53.00 and the £3.00 appears as a clearly labelled line.
Both are fine. Hiding it is not.
Organisers choose which model they use, and the fee is itemised at checkout either way. You can disagree with a fee you can see. A fee you find at the last step is a different thing entirely.
What to look for anywhere you buy
- Is the total shown before you enter card details, or after?
- Are there separate "service" and "booking" fees doing the same job twice?
- Does the refund policy appear before purchase or only in the confirmation email?
- On a resale site, is face value shown alongside the asking price?
Common questions
- How much does TicketRoyality charge per ticket?
- Nothing. On a £50 ticket the organiser receives £50.00. The buyer pays a £2.49 TicketRoyality Service Fee, shown inside the £52.49 advertised price, and we absorb card processing out of it.
- Who pays the booking fee, the buyer or the organiser?
- The organiser chooses. They can absorb the fee, in which case you pay the advertised price flat, or pass it on, in which case it appears as an itemised line at checkout. It is shown either way before you enter card details.
Keep reading
- ACU: paying for AI without a surprise billOne credit, one price, quoted before the work runs and stopped hard at zero — because the failure mode of usage-based AI billing is a five-figure invoice nobody authorised.Money, fees and payouts
- What we take, and when you get paid0% organiser commission. You keep 100% of every ticket value; our revenue is a service fee the buyer pays, published rather than summarised.Money, fees and payouts
- Mobile money, and why verification is harder than collectionIn much of the world mobile money is the primary rail. The hard part is not accepting it — it is confirming that the payment you were told about is the payment that arrived.Money, fees and payouts
- Paying for a ticket, in whatever way you actually pay for thingsCards, mobile money and offline settlement — and why the total is shown before you enter card details rather than after.Money, fees and payouts
Written and edited by people. Nothing on this blog is generated and published automatically — see our editorial approach.