Why Pay a Commission on Your Own Events? What Venues Should Know About Ticketing Fees
If you've ever sold tickets to your own open house, vendor showcase, or workshop through Eventbrite or Wix Events, you've probably noticed the same thing every venue owner notices eventually: the platform takes a cut, and that cut adds up fast.
Here's the part that stings most. When you're hosting your own event in your own space, you're still handing over a percentage of every ticket sold — for the privilege of using a form and a payment button.
With the new BrandWave Events beta, that's no longer the only option.
What Eventbrite and Wix Events actually cost you
Let's look at the real numbers.
Eventbrite charges a service fee of roughly 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket, on top of a separate 2.9% payment processing fee. On a $50 ticket, that works out to a little over $5 in fees — about 10% of the ticket price. Sell 100 of those tickets for a workshop or open house, and you've handed over $500 before you've covered a single cost of running the event. Lower-priced tickets are hit even harder: a $20 or $25 ticket can lose 13-15% of its value to fees alone.
Wix Events is a bit gentler on paper, with a flat 2.5% ticket service fee on top of standard payment processing. You can choose to pass that fee to the buyer or absorb it yourself, but either way, it's a recurring cost tied to every transaction, on every event, indefinitely.
Neither platform is "wrong" — they're built for organizers who need broad public discovery and marketplace reach. But if you're a venue selling tickets to your own programming, or helping a client manage registrations for an event already happening in your space, you're paying an ongoing percentage for tools that could just as easily live inside the system you're already using to run your business.
A different model: ticketing as part of your operating system, not a separate toll
BrandWave Events is currently in beta, and it's built on a simple idea: the tools you need to sell tickets, manage RSVPs, and check guests in should be part of the same system that's already managing your inquiries, your calendar, your client communication, and your payments — not a separate platform with its own fee structure layered on top.
The beta currently supports:
Ticketed events and RSVP events, free or paid
Online or in-person events with public event pages
Custom ticket types, quantities, and coupon codes
Event schedules and registration forms with custom fields
QR code ticket generation and mobile check-in
Full registration, order, and payment visibility inside BrandWave
For venues, this isn't just about running your own events more affordably. It opens up a real service opportunity. If a client books your space for a workshop and needs to sell 75 tickets, you can offer registration setup, payment collection, reminders, and check-in support as part of the experience — instead of sending them off to set up their own Eventbrite page.
Where this fits right now
Because the feature is in beta, it's best suited to straightforward use cases: single-date ticketed events, RSVPs, open houses, workshops, small conferences, classes, and similar venue-hosted programming. More complex functionality — recurring events, automated refund flows, and deeper attendee mapping for multi-ticket purchases — is still in development.
If you're already a BrandWave venue, beta access is live inside your account at no additional cost. It's a good moment to test it on something simple and see how it feels before leaning on it for a bigger event.
The bigger picture is one we've talked about before on this blog: independent venues shouldn't have to stitch together five different platforms — one for inquiries, one for payments, one for tickets, one for follow-up — just to run events well. Every tool you fold into one system is one less subscription, one less login, and one less percentage point coming off the top of your own events.
Not yet a subscriber? Book a BrandWave for Events demo today to see how much you can save on your venue management tech stack.
