Set up an event on any ticketing platform, and you’ll hit this decision within the first few minutes: do you absorb the service fee yourself, or pass it on to whoever’s buying a ticket? It sounds like a small checkbox, but it changes your advertised ticket price, your actual take-home per sale, and — more than most organisers realise — how many people finish checkout instead of bailing out at the last screen.
Every platform lets you choose. What differs is the default they set you up with, whether that default is easy to change, and how the fee actually shows up to the person buying the ticket. We’ve compared EventBookings, TryBooking, Ticketebo, Humanitix and Eventbrite to lay out how each one of them handles it. For a side-by-side look at these platforms, see our full platform comparison.
Quick-Reference Table
| Platform | Default setting | Can you change it? | Fee visible at checkout? |
| EventBookings | Organiser absorbs | Yes | No — attendee sees the clean ticket price |
| TryBooking | Split (org absorbs processing, attendee pays ticket fee) | Yes | Partially |
| Ticketebo | Attendee pays | Not typically adjustable | Yes, as a line item |
| Humanitix | Attendee pays | Yes, organiser can absorb some or all | Yes, unless absorbed |
| Eventbrite | Attendee pays | Yes | Yes, added at checkout |
Worth noting straight away: “default” doesn’t mean “only option.” Every one of these platforms gives you some control, but the amount of control — and how obvious that setting is when you’re building your event — varies more than you’d expect.
Platform-by-Platform Breakdown
EventBookings
EventBookings starts you off with the organiser absorbing the service fee. In practice, that means whatever ticket price you type in is exactly what the attendee pays at checkout — no added line item, no surprise total. If you’d rather protect your margin and have attendees cover the fee instead, that’s a setting you can flip, and EventBookings’ own pricing calculator shows you the exact numbers either way before you publish.
This absorb-by-default approach tends to suit organisers who care about a clean, no-surprises checkout experience more than squeezing every dollar of margin out of each sale — though obviously you can go the other way if margin matters more to you.
TryBooking
TryBooking splits the fee by default rather than putting it all on one side. The organiser wears the processing fee (2.5%), while the attendee sees the flat ticket fee (50 cents, or 15 cents for tickets under $5) added at checkout. You can adjust this split in your account settings if you’d rather have attendees cover the whole thing, or absorb it all yourself.
Ticketebo
Ticketebo charges its booking fee to the buyer as a straightforward line item on the order — this is the platform’s standard structure rather than something most organisers reconfigure. If a clean, fee-free checkout price matters more to your event than who technically pays, this is worth knowing upfront rather than discovering it once tickets are live.
Humanitix
Humanitix defaults to the buyer paying the fee, but gives organisers the option to absorb some or all of it instead. Because Humanitix puts its profit toward children’s education charities, some organisers actually lean into the attendee-pays default here — it becomes part of the pitch (“your fee supports X”), rather than something to hide or minimise.
Eventbrite
Eventbrite defaults to the attendee paying, with the fee added visibly at checkout on top of the advertised ticket price. This is adjustable in your event settings if you’d prefer to absorb it, but the default experience — and the one most people encounter when buying tickets through Eventbrite — is a ticket price plus fees shown separately before payment.
Absorb vs Pass On: The Real Trade-off
The fee doesn’t disappear either way — you’re just deciding whose number it shows up on. Here’s what a $50 ticket actually looks like under each model, using each platform’s standard rate.
| Platform | Fee on a $50 ticket | If you absorb it | If you pass it on |
| EventBookings | $1.55 | Buyer pays $50.00 — you receive $48.45 | Buyer pays $51.55 — you receive $50.00 |
| TryBooking | $1.75 | Buyer pays $50.00 — you receive $48.25 | Buyer pays $51.75 — you receive $50.00 |
| Ticketebo | $2.00 | Buyer pays $50.00 — you receive $48.00 | Buyer pays $52.00 — you receive $50.00 |
| Humanitix | $2.99 | Buyer pays $50.00 — you receive $47.01 | Buyer pays $52.99 — you receive $50.00 |
| Eventbrite | $3.87 | Buyer pays $50.00 — you receive $46.13 | Buyer pays $53.87 — you receive $50.00 |
Absorbing the fee keeps your advertised price exactly where you want it — handy for marketing, and generally the friendlier-looking option to a first-time visitor scanning your event page. The cost is real, though: it comes straight off your revenue per ticket, and across a few hundred sales that gap adds up fast.
Passing the fee on protects your margin completely — you get the full ticket price every time — but the checkout total ends up higher than the number the attendee first saw. There’s a reasonably well-documented pattern in ticketing generally: unexpected costs appearing late in checkout are one of the more common reasons people abandon a purchase, so this isn’t purely a cosmetic decision. It can genuinely affect your conversion rate.
Which Model Fits Which Event Type
Fundraisers and not-for-profits. Most organisers running a charity event, school fundraiser, or community cause pass the fee on. The logic is straightforward — if you’re raising money for a specific goal, every dollar of that goal needs to actually land in the account. A $50 ticket that nets $46 because you absorbed the fee is $4 short of the target; multiply that across a few hundred tickets and it’s a meaningful gap.
Community and free-feel events. For anything where the vibe matters — a local market, a casual meetup, a first-time event where you’re still building trust with an audience — absorbing the fee tends to work better. A clean advertised price with nothing added at checkout reads as more welcoming, and it removes one small point of friction for people who aren’t yet sold on showing up.
Larger or commercial events. Once you’re running bigger events with tighter margins, passing the fee on usually wins out, simply because the dollar amounts get large enough that absorbing it stops being a rounding error and starts being a real cost. This is also where it’s worth comparing platforms properly, since the fee itself varies more than the absorb/pass-on decision does.
There’s no universal right answer here — it genuinely depends on your event, your audience, and how sensitive your margin is. What matters is making the choice deliberately rather than just going with whatever the platform defaults to.
Bottom Line
Every platform we looked at gives organisers a choice, but the starting point differs: EventBookings defaults to a clean checkout with the organiser absorbing the fee, TryBooking splits it, Ticketebo and Eventbrite put it on the attendee by default, and Humanitix does too while giving you the option to absorb it and use that as part of your event’s story. None of these defaults are locked in — check your account settings before you publish, run the numbers both ways for your actual ticket price, and pick whichever model matches what you’re trying to achieve with the event.
For a full look at what each platform charges before you even get to this decision, see our Ticketing Fees Comparison Report and Cheapest Ticketing Platforms in Australia breakdown.
