Short answer: selling tickets through a ticketing platform typically costs between €0.50 and €3.50 per ticket sold, built from three parts: the platform fee (a flat amount or a percentage of 5 to 12 per cent), the payment costs charged by your payment provider (around €0.32 per iDEAL | Wero transaction) and sometimes a subscription or setup fee. The biggest difference sits in the platform fee: with a percentage model your costs rise with the ticket price, with a flat amount they do not. For an event with 500 tickets at €25, an 8 per cent commission means €1,000 in platform costs; a flat fee of €0.50 per ticket comes to €250. At MijnEvent that flat fee is €0.50 including VAT on Pay as you go with no setup costs — and free tickets are always fee-free. Below we work through all three cost components one by one.
What the costs are made of
1. The platform fee
This is what the ticketing platform charges for its own service. It comes in two flavours:
- Percentage based: 5 to 12 per cent of the ticket price, often with a flat amount per ticket on top. Most international platforms use this model.
- Flat amount per ticket: a fee that stays the same whether your ticket costs €10 or €75. MijnEvent charges €0.50 per paid ticket, or €0.25 with the Organiser plan at €14.95 once per published event.
The distinction matters more than it looks. A percentage is a share of your revenue, so the platform earns more from the same amount of work as soon as you raise your prices. A flat fee is a price for a service: the checkout, the tickets and the scanning at the gate cost the platform the same whether the ticket is cheap or expensive.
2. The payment costs
Your payment service provider — Mollie, in our case — charges a transaction fee per payment. Mollie's public pricing lists around €0.32 for an iDEAL | Wero transaction; card payments are charged as a percentage plus a flat amount. One detail is easy to miss: payment costs scale with the number of orders, not the number of tickets. Four friends buying together in one order cost you one transaction fee, not four.
Watch how platforms present this. Some fold the payment costs into a higher commission so the bill looks like one number; others let you pay your own provider separately. At MijnEvent the payment runs through your own Mollie account, so you pay Mollie's rates directly and without a mark-up. We wrote a separate piece on what payment processing really adds if you want the full arithmetic.
3. Subscriptions and hidden costs
Look past the fee per ticket. Setup costs, monthly minimums, payout fees, refund fees and charges for the scanning app all belong in the comparison. Ask who pays the service fee as well — you, or the visitor on top of the ticket price — and whether free tickets are charged at the full rate.
Worked example: 100 and 500 tickets
| 100 tickets at €15 | 500 tickets at €25 | |
|---|---|---|
| Percentage platform (8% + €0.50) | €170 | €1,250 |
| Percentage platform (5%) | €75 | €625 |
| MijnEvent Pay as you go (€0.50 flat) | €50 | €250 |
| MijnEvent Organiser (€14.95 + €0.25) | €39.95 | €139.95 |
Mollie's payment costs come on top in every case and are comparable across platforms. The break-even point between Pay as you go and the Organiser plan sits at around 60 paid tickets per event: below that the flat €14.95 does not earn itself back, above it the lower per-ticket fee does the work.
Note what happens between the two columns. Going from 100 to 500 tickets multiplies your revenue by roughly eight, and a percentage platform multiplies its share by the same factor. The flat fee grows fivefold — one step per extra ticket, not one step per extra euro of ticket price.
Free tickets, and why they are a fair test
A registration for a free event costs the platform almost exactly what a paid ticket costs: a page, a checkout, an email, a QR code at the door. The question is whether the platform charges you for it. At MijnEvent free events are genuinely free — tickets priced at €0 carry no fee at all, on every plan and without needing to ask. It is a small clause, but a revealing one when you compare providers.
Who pays: you or your visitor?
Many organisers pass on some or all of the costs as a service fee. At MijnEvent you set service fees per ticket type yourself, with your own label, and the checkout shows the visitor exactly what they are paying. There is a service fee calculator if you want to see what a given fee does to your bottom line first.
Transparency pays here. Visitors abandon a checkout over surprise costs in the final step, not over an honest cost line they saw coming.
How to compare platforms fairly
- Work through your own scenario: number of tickets × ticket price, using each platform's real fee formula rather than its headline number.
- Add the payment costs separately and check whether a mark-up has been applied to them.
- Ask about refund fees, payout fees and the cost of the scanning app.
- Check what free tickets cost — nothing at MijnEvent, the full fee at some others.
- Check when you get the money. A platform that holds your revenue until after the event is charging you in cashflow rather than in fees.
Want to put us next to a specific provider? Our comparisons with 51 ticketing platforms list verified rates per supplier. What it costs at MijnEvent — €0.50 per paid ticket, or €0.25 with the Organiser plan, and free tickets always fee-free — is set out on selling tickets cheaply, and the reasoning behind that model in sell tickets without high fees.
Cost is only one of the things to weigh up. The eight points that actually decide whether a platform fits your event — payouts, resale, accessibility, lock-in — are in choosing a ticketing platform.
Ready to work it out with your own numbers? Create your organiser account — there are no setup costs, no subscription and no contract, so you only pay once you actually sell a ticket.
