"Can you help me earn the costs back?" It is one of the fairest questions we get, and the answer is yes — in two ways. You can ask for a voluntary donation at checkout, and you can charge service fees that you set yourself. Both can be switched on or off whenever you like, and the proceeds of both land directly in your own account. At MijnEvent the platform fee is a fixed amount per paid ticket (€0.50 including VAT on Pay as you go), so you know exactly what you have to earn back.
1. A voluntary donation at checkout
Visitors buying a ticket for your club night, parade or festival are often happy to give a little extra — as long as you ask. And the best moment to ask is while they are ordering, when their wallet is already out.
Switch on "Enable voluntary donation" in your event settings and a small block appears under the order summary at checkout. You write the wording yourself — "Support our festival", "Chip in for the clubhouse", "Help pay for the mill's upkeep". The visitor types in an amount, sees it appear as a separate line in the total, and can move on with a single tap on "No thanks". It never pushes.
The key part: MijnEvent charges a 0% platform fee on donations. The fee is based on the number of paid tickets in the order, and the donation is not counted. The donated amount simply travels along in the same payment through your own Mollie account, so it reaches you in full. In practice this is often enough to cover the cost of the software entirely.
Want to raise money separately from ticket sales too — a campaign with a target, a progress bar and a QR code for the door? That is what the donation page is for. Same promise, different place. More about the field itself in A donation field at ticket checkout.
2. Service fees you decide on
The second route is more direct: charge your visitors a service fee. You set it per ticket type — a fixed amount on top of the ticket price — and you pick the label yourself: Booking fee, Administration fee, Organisation contribution. Leave it empty and it reads a neutral "Service fee".
You decide the amount, and zero is a perfectly good answer. Some organisers pass on exactly the platform fee, others add a little to cover Mollie's transaction costs as well, and others deliberately leave it at zero to keep the price on the poster clean. You can even vary it per ticket type: charge it on VIP tickets, not on children's tickets.
The proceeds are yours. Service fees sit inside the total that runs through your own Mollie account, so there is nothing to settle afterwards — it simply arrives with your regular payout. See Setting up service fees per ticket type for the steps.
One rule we hold to strictly: the fee is always visible before anyone pays, as a separate line above the total. That is not just good manners, it is what consumer rules require. Visitors rarely abandon a purchase over an honest, up-front cost line; they abandon over surprises in the final step.
When do you break even? A worked example
Take an event with 300 paid tickets on the Pay as you go model:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| MijnEvent platform fee | 300 × €0.50 = €150 |
| Option A: a €0.50 service fee per ticket | 300 × €0.50 = €150 → exactly covered |
| Option B: donations | 50 visitors × €3 = €150 → exactly covered |
| Option C: €0.25 service fee plus some donations | €75 plus the remainder from donations |
Free tickets are always fee-free, so they never appear in the left-hand column. If you sell regularly, the Organiser plan (€14.95 per event, €0.25 per ticket) is usually cheaper — the break-even point sits around 60 paid tickets per event. Mollie's payment costs (roughly €0.30 per order for iDEAL | Wero) are separate; you pay those directly to Mollie, with no mark-up from us.
Combining the two
They do not clash. Service fees are predictable — you know in advance what they will yield. Donations are not, but they scale with your audience's goodwill and cost you nothing if nobody joins in. A common combination: a modest service fee that covers the hard costs, plus a donation field with wording that explains where the money goes. That last bit does most of the work — "Support us" raises less than "Every euro goes towards the new sound system in the village hall".
How to switch it on
- Open your event in Beheer → settings and switch on "Enable voluntary donation".
- Write your own donation text — name concretely what the money is for.
- Go to your ticket types and fill in the service fee and label per type (or leave them at zero).
- Walk through your own checkout to see exactly what the visitor sees: subtotal, service fee, donation, total.
In short: the cost of selling tickets does not have to come out of your own budget. Two switches, both transparent to your visitor, and both paying out straight into your own account. The full pricing and a worked pass-through example are on sell tickets cheaply.
