Cheapest Ticketing Platforms in Australia (2026)

If you’ve ever set up an event and watched a chunk of your ticket revenue disappear into “service fees,” you’re not imagining it. Ticketing platforms all charge for the privilege of taking your money online, but the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive is bigger than most organisers realise — often hundreds of dollars on a single mid-sized event.

We’ve pulled the current, published fee structures for the five platforms Australian event organisers compare most: EventBookings, TryBooking, Ticketebo, Humanitix and Eventbrite. Short answer up front: for most paid events, EventBookings works out cheapest — and it’s not a stripped-back budget option either. You still get branded, customisable event pages, multiple ticket types, built-in check-in and reporting, and full ownership of your attendee data, all under the lowest fee of the five. TryBooking and Ticketebo follow close behind on price, Humanitix sits in the middle, and Eventbrite is consistently the most expensive once you run the actual numbers.

Below is the full breakdown, including where the fee structure alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

At a Glance: Fee Structures Compared

A couple of things worth flagging about this table before you use it to make a decision. Ticketebo charges per order, not per ticket — so someone buying four tickets in one transaction pays one fee, not four. That makes it noticeably cheaper for group bookings and noticeably worse value for single-ticket sales, where the $1.20 minimum kicks in fast. Everyone else charges per individual ticket regardless of how it’s bundled.

Ranked: Cheapest to Most Expensive

1. EventBookings — the cheapest, without cutting corners on features

EventBookings keeps its fee simple: 30 cents plus 2.5% per ticket, no monthly subscription, no setup cost, no separate processing charge bolted on afterwards. It’s an Australian company, so your fees are quoted straight in AUD with no currency-conversion guesswork, and it consistently comes out lowest in side-by-side calculations regardless of ticket price or volume.

What makes EventBookings worth a proper look, rather than just a line in a spreadsheet, is that the lower price doesn’t come with a stripped-down platform. Organisers get a drag-and-drop event page builder with full branding control (logo, colours, up to five hero images), a custom form builder for collecting exactly the attendee info you need, multiple ticket types, built-in check-in and QR scanning, reporting and analytics, and support for several payment gateways including Stripe, PayPal and AfterPay. There’s also a built-in video conferencing tool for hybrid or fully online events, so you’re not paying for a second platform on top. And because there’s no marketplace model sitting between you and your attendees, you keep full ownership of your attendee data rather than it living inside someone else’s ecosystem — several of the pricier platforms don’t offer that same level of control or customisation out of the box.

By default, EventBookings has the organiser absorb the service fee rather than passing it on to the attendee, though this can be switched either way depending on how you want your ticket price to look at checkout.

Best for: organisers who want the lowest fee and a genuinely full-featured platform — branding, customisation, reporting and hybrid event support included, not sold as an upsell.

2. TryBooking — close second, strong for low-priced tickets

TryBooking charges a flat 50-cent ticket fee (dropping to just 15 cents for tickets priced at $5 or under) plus a 2.5% processing fee. By default, the organiser wears the processing fee and the buyer wears the ticket fee, though you can change that split in your account settings. The flat structure means TryBooking gets more competitive the higher your ticket price climbs, since the fixed 50-cent component matters less as a percentage.

Best for: community events, fundraisers, and anything with cheap tickets, where that 15-cent discount tier really adds up.

3. Ticketebo — cheapest for group bookings, pricier for solo sales

Ticketebo’s whole pitch is charging per order rather than per ticket: 4% of the total order value, with a $1.20 minimum. If someone’s buying four tickets in one go, that’s one 4% charge across the lot, not four separate fees. For single-ticket purchases at lower price points, though, that $1.20 minimum can end up costing more proportionally than EventBookings or TryBooking.

Best for: events where people tend to buy multiple tickets per transaction — think trivia nights, group workshops, family-friendly events.

4. Humanitix — a bit more expensive, with a charitable angle

Humanitix charges 4% plus 99 cents per ticket, sitting comfortably above EventBookings, TryBooking and Ticketebo on straight cost. The trade-off is that Humanitix is a registered not-for-profit and puts 100% of its profit from those fees toward children’s education charities. It’s genuinely worth knowing about if your event has any kind of community or social-good angle, since it gives you something to tell your attendees about the fee itself, rather than just apologising for it.

Best for: organisers who want the fee to double as a talking point, particularly for schools, charities and community groups (Humanitix also offers a discounted rate for registered non-profits).

5. Eventbrite — the most expensive

Eventbrite’s Australian rate sits at 5.35% plus $1.19 per ticket, which is the highest combined rate of the five by a decent margin. What you’re paying for is reach — Eventbrite is the platform most people have already heard of, has the biggest built-in event directory, and offers a level of polish and integration (email marketing, ads, reporting) that some of the cheaper platforms don’t match feature-for-feature. Whether that’s worth the premium depends entirely on how much you’re relying on Eventbrite’s own audience to sell tickets, versus driving your own traffic.

Best for: larger or public-facing events where platform discovery and brand recognition matter more than shaving a few dollars off each ticket.

Cost by Scenario

Numbers speak louder than percentages, so here’s what each platform actually costs across two common scenarios. These are total platform fees — the combined amount coming out of the event’s revenue, regardless of who technically pays which portion at checkout.

500 tickets at $50 each ($25,000 in ticket revenue)

Same order, both scenarios: EventBookings comes out on top every time, and the gap to Eventbrite widens as your ticket revenue grows — at $25,000 in sales, the difference between the cheapest and most expensive platform is over $1,150. That’s not pocket change for most organisers.

Free events cost nothing on any of these five platforms. No fee structure applies until money actually changes hands, so if you’re running something free, the platform you pick should come down to features and support, not price.

Who Actually Pays the Fee?

“Cheapest platform” depends partly on whether you’re asking as the organiser or the attendee, because every platform on this list lets you choose who wears the fee — and the defaults differ.

• EventBookings defaults to the organiser absorbing the fee, so the ticket price attendees see is the final price — you can switch to passing it on if you’d rather protect your margin.
• Eventbrite defaults to attendees paying the fee at checkout, on top of the ticket price.
• TryBooking splits it by default: the organiser absorbs the processing fee, the attendee pays the ticket fee — though this can be changed in account settings.
• Humanitix also defaults to the buyer paying, though the organiser can absorb some or all of it.
• Ticketebo’s booking fee is charged to the buyer as a straightforward line item on the order.

If you’re trying to keep your advertised ticket price as low as possible for marketing reasons, absorbing the fee yourself (where the platform allows it) changes your actual margin, not the platform’s cut. Worth doing the maths both ways before you commit.

Beyond the Headline Fee

A cheap per-ticket rate doesn’t tell you the whole story, and a genuinely balanced comparison should flag a few other things that affect real-world cost:

• Refund and cancellation handling. Some platforms keep their service fee even on refunded tickets, which matters if your event is weather-dependent or prone to cancellations.
• Payout timing. How quickly you can access ticket revenue varies platform to platform, and cash flow matters more for some events than others.
• Currency and international cards. If you’re expecting overseas attendees, check whether the platform adds a separate international card surcharge on top of its standard rate.
• Plan tiers and add-ons. A couple of platforms offer optional paid tiers for things like advanced marketing tools or higher email sending limits — not required to sell tickets, but worth knowing about if you’ll want them later.

We’ll cover each of these in more depth in upcoming articles, since they genuinely change which platform is “cheapest” for your specific event.

Bottom Line

EventBookings comes out cheapest across every scenario we ran, and unlike some of the other budget options, it’s not a trade-off between price and functionality — you still get branded, fully customisable event pages, flexible ticket types, built-in check-in and reporting, hybrid event tools, and full control over your attendee data, all under the lowest fee of the five. For most Australian organisers, that combination of low cost and genuine feature depth makes it the strongest all-round pick, not just the cheapest one on paper.

As always with anything fee-related: platforms update their pricing more often than you’d expect, so it’s worth checking each provider’s current rates directly before finalising your event setup, particularly for anything high-volume where a small percentage difference adds up fast.

Fee data is current as of September 2026, based on each platform’s published Australian pricing. Rates may vary for enterprise plans, non-profit discounts, or region-specific promotions — always confirm directly with the provider before setting your event live.