How Much Does It Cost to Sell 500 Tickets in Australia? A Platform Comparison

Picture a mid-sized event: 500 tickets, $50 each, $25,000 coming in the door. Run that through five different event ticketing platforms and the fees alone swing from $775 to just over $1,930. Same event, same tickets, same $25,000 — and a gap of more than $1,150 depending purely on which logo is on your checkout page.

So where does that gap actually come from? Every platform bundles two things into its fee, whether it shows them as one line or two. There’s the platform fee — what the ticketing company charges for the software, the event page, the reporting dashboard, all of it. And there’s payment processing — the cut that goes to whoever’s actually moving the money, since Stripe, PayPal and the card networks all take something regardless of which ticketing tool sits on top. The good news for Australian organisers: every platform in this comparison already folds both into the one number. Nothing extra lands on your statement later.

What We’re Comparing

500 tickets, $50 each. A $25,000 event — think a mid-sized conference, a community festival, or a run of a few nights at a local venue. We looked at the five platforms Australian organisers actually compare: EventBookings, TryBooking, Ticketebo, Humanitix and Eventbrite.

The Headline Numbers

How Each Platform Gets There

EventBookings keeps its structure simple — 2.5% of the ticket price, plus 30 cents, and that’s the whole fee. On a $50 ticket, the percentage alone comes to $1.25; add the flat component and you land at $1.55 a ticket. Multiply that out across 500 tickets and you’re at $775 total, the lowest of the five.

TryBooking does something slightly different. Rather than one blended rate, it splits the charge into a 50-cent ticket fee (that drops to 15 cents on anything under $5) and a separate 2.5% processing cut. Add them together on a $50 ticket — 50 cents plus $1.25 — and you get $1.75 a ticket, or $875 once you’ve sold all 500.

Then there’s Ticketebo, which works a bit differently again: it charges per order, not per ticket. The rate is 4% of whatever the order’s worth, with a $1.20 floor underneath it. On a single $50 ticket, 4% comes to exactly $2 — above the minimum, so that’s the number that applies. Across 500 individual tickets, that’s $1,000. But here’s the thing worth knowing if your event involves group bookings: someone buying four tickets in one transaction only pays that fee once, not four times. For events where people tend to buy in bulk — think trivia nights or family bookings — this quietly changes the maths in Ticketebo’s favour.

Humanitix charges 4% plus 99 cents, no separate processing line to think about. On a $50 ticket that’s $2 from the percentage and 99 cents flat, landing at $2.99 a ticket — $1,495 across the full 500. It’s a step up from the first three, and the reason plenty of organisers pay it anyway is that Humanitix channels its profits into children’s education charities. For an event with any kind of community or cause angle, that’s not nothing.

And then Eventbrite, the most expensive of the group by a reasonable margin. Its Australian rate is 5.35% plus $1.19, which works out to $2.675 from the percentage and $1.19 flat — $3.865 a ticket once you round it properly, or $1,932.50 across 500. What you’re paying for here is mostly reach: Eventbrite’s own audience, its event directory, the marketing tools layered on top. Whether that’s worth an extra $1,157.50 compared with EventBookings depends entirely on how much of your ticket sales actually come from people browsing Eventbrite itself, versus your own marketing doing the heavy lifting.

Does the Ranking Hold at a Lower Price?

We ran the same 500 tickets through a $20 price tag instead of $50, mostly to check whether the order changes. It doesn’t.

The gaps shrink in dollar terms, as you’d expect, but nobody leapfrogs anybody. What this does show is how much the percentage component matters once ticket prices climb. EventBookings and TryBooking both lean on smaller percentages, so they stay relatively gentle as prices rise. Eventbrite’s larger percentage means its total grows the fastest of the five — the gap between it and EventBookings is $730 at $20 a ticket, and nearly $1,160 at $50. Same five platforms, same event size, just a different price tag, and the spread between cheapest and priciest more than doubles.

A Few Things This Comparison Doesn’t Cover

Fees aren’t the whole story, and it’s worth checking a couple of things before you commit to a platform on price alone. Does the quoted rate include GST, or is that added separately? It varies, so confirm your own situation rather than assuming. Who actually pays the fee also matters less than you’d think for your bottom line — every platform here lets you choose whether the organiser absorbs it or passes it to attendees, and the totals above hold either way, just split differently (we’ve gone into this in more depth in our piece on who pays ticketing fees). And payout timing is worth a glance too — some platforms release your money as tickets sell, others sit on it until after the event, which matters more if you’re fronting costs beforehand.

Scaling Up or Down

None of these rates include a volume discount at the tiers we’ve compared, so the maths is refreshingly linear. Selling 1,000 tickets instead of 500? Double everything in the table. Only expecting 250? Halve it. If your numbers are still moving around, the per-ticket column is honestly the more useful one to bookmark — it doesn’t shift no matter how your final headcount lands.

So, Which One’s Actually Cheapest?

At $25,000 in revenue, EventBookings comes out $1,157.50 ahead of Eventbrite — and that gap holds up whether you’re pricing tickets at $20 or $50. That’s real money on any event budget, not a rounding error. Price isn’t the only thing that should drive your decision, of course — features, support, and how fees show up to your attendees all matter too — but if cost is high on your list, the numbers here are about as clear-cut as this kind of comparison gets. For the fuller picture across every Australian platform we track, our Cheapest Ticketing Platforms in Australia breakdown goes deeper.

Fee data current as of September 2026, based on each platform’s published Australian pricing. Platforms update their rates more often than you’d think, so it’s worth confirming directly before you lock anything in.