For bands · from a fan
Sell your own tickets. Keep the fee.
A ticket is a product with a date, a limit and a code that opens a door once. The store does all three. For your own shows there is no reason a company should take a fifth of what your fans pay.
What it costs, per ticket
| Sold through | Fan pays | You keep, each | Over 150 | What the difference is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your own store | $18.00 | $17.18 | $2576.70 | Stripe's card fee. Nothing else, no monthly charge. |
| A flat-fee ticketing site | $18.75 | $16.43 | $2464.20 | About 75¢ a ticket plus card processing, sometimes a monthly fee too. |
| A percentage platform | $20.69 | $14.72 | $2208.30 | Around 3.7% + $1.79 to the platform, and the fan pays a booking fee on top. |
| Ticketmaster | $21.78 | $17.18 | $2576.70 | About 21% in service and facility fees, paid by the fan. The 2026 settlement's 15% cap covers only Live Nation's own amphitheatres, and is still under court review. |
The fan’s column is what they actually pay at checkout. On a sold-out room the gap between the first row and the last is what the fan saves, not only what you keep.
How it works
Add the show to your store.
A product with a
showblock: venue, city, date, doors, and how many you can fit. The capacity is the limit; the store stops selling when it’s reached and refuses to sell a show that has already happened.Fans buy it like a shirt.
Same checkout, same Apple Pay, same receipt. The price on the page is the price they pay: there is no fee added at the last screen, because there is nobody to add one.
They keep the ticket on their phone.
They open
/tickets, type the email they bought with, and get a big code for each ticket. Tell them to save the page before they leave home, so it works when the venue has no signal.You work your own door.
Whoever’s on the door opens the store’s door page on a phone and types the code. Green means let them in, red means already used, and the buyer’s name is right there. Each code works once and can’t be invented. Dark screen, big letters, one hand.
Where this stops
A venue with an exclusive ticketing contract. That’s the whole moat, and it isn’t technical: no software gets around a contract the room already signed. Arenas and most mid-size rooms are spoken for.
What isn’t spoken for: your own shows, record releases, house shows, all-ages spaces, DIY venues, a room you rent yourself, and a great many independent clubs that would rather not hand over the fee either. Ask the venue before you assume. Plenty of them are stuck with a system they don’t like.
Why the fees are what they are
Ticketmaster’s own figure for its share is 5 to 7% of the ticket; the rest of what a fan pays is the venue’s facility fee and a per-order charge. That stacks to about 21% on a typical order.
The March 2026 settlement with the Department of Justice caps service fees at 15% of face value, but read the fine print before you count on it: the cap covers Ticketmaster’s own sales at amphitheatres Live Nation owns or controls, not every venue on the platform, and the settlement is still going through Tunney Act review, so a judge has not signed it off. Analysts who read the deal do not expect what fans pay to fall much. On a $30 ticket, 15% is still $4.50 the fan pays and nobody plays a note for.
Card processing on that same ticket is about $1.17. The rest was the middle.
Written by a fan.No affiliate links; nobody here is paid to name anyone.Fee figures gathered 26 Sep 2026 from Ticketmaster’s own statements, the DOJ settlement as filed (not yet approved), and the published rates of independent platforms.