Your club is running a fundraiser dinner. Two hundred tickets at $35 a head — a good night, and $7,000 through the door. Then the ticketing invoice arrives, and a few hundred dollars you thought you'd raised has quietly gone to a ticketing company. For a volunteer committee counting every dollar toward new equipment or a grant match, that's money that should have stayed with the club.
Booking fees are the hidden tax on community fundraising. This guide explains where they come from, and how your club can sell tickets to an event and keep every dollar.
Where booking fees actually come from
Most online ticketing platforms make their money in one of two ways — and often both at once:
- A per-ticket booking fee — a fixed amount (often 50c to a couple of dollars) added to every single ticket, sometimes charged to the buyer, sometimes to your club.
- A percentage of the sale — a processing or service fee, commonly 2% to 5% of the ticket price, taken off the top before the money reaches you.
On a small event those percentages sound harmless. On a fundraiser they add up quickly.
The maths on a $7,000 fundraiser: 200 tickets with a 50c booking fee is $100. A 2.5% processing fee on $7,000 is another $175. That's $275 gone from one night — enough to matter when you're raising money for the club.
None of this is hidden malice — it's just how those platforms are built. But for a community club, it's worth knowing that there are ways to avoid most or all of it.
The three ways to reduce or remove ticketing fees
1. Take bank transfers instead of card payments
The simplest fee-free option is the oldest one: let people pay by direct bank transfer. The buyer books their ticket, gets your club's BSB and account number with a reference to use, and transfers the money straight to the club. There's no card processor in the middle, so there's no processing fee — the club receives the full amount.
The trade-off is that it's slightly less convenient than tapping a card, and someone on the committee needs to tick off payments as they arrive. For a club event where most attendees are members or locals, that's usually a fair trade for keeping 100%.
2. Use your own payment processor
If you do want to accept cards — and for a larger public event, card payment genuinely lifts sales — the key is to connect your club's own payment account rather than paying a ticketing company to handle it. Payment processors like Stripe charge their standard transaction rate (which you can't avoid if you take cards anywhere), but that goes to the processor, not to a ticketing middleman adding a second fee on top. The money lands in the club's account, not a platform's.
3. Choose ticketing that doesn't charge its own fee
The booking fee — the ticketing company's cut — is the part you can actually eliminate. Some systems charge a per-ticket fee for the privilege of using them. Others don't. If your club is already paying for a platform that runs your admin, ticketing that comes included with no extra per-ticket charge means the only cost is the card processing you'd pay anyway.
What to look for in fee-free club ticketing
Avoiding fees is the headline, but a ticketing system for a community event needs to actually work on the night. Here's a checklist worth running through:
- No per-ticket booking fee — the club keeps 100% (card processing aside).
- Money goes straight to the club — into your own account, not held by a platform.
- Your club's branding — the booking page should look like your event, not an advertisement for a ticketing vendor.
- The right seating for your venue — tables for a dinner, reserved rows for a concert, or general admission for a casual night.
- Tickets on a phone — a QR code the guest can show at the door, or print if they prefer.
- Easy check-in — a way to tick people off or scan them in at the door without a queue.
- No separate login for the committee — ideally it lives where you already manage the club.
A quick word on "free" ticketing
Plenty of platforms advertise themselves as free. Read the detail: "free" usually means free for you, because the per-ticket fee is passed to the buyer instead. Your attendees still pay it — it's just added to the ticket price at checkout. For a community club selling to its own members and supporters, a fee on the ticket is still a fee coming out of your community's pocket. Genuinely fee-free means nobody pays a booking fee, on either side.
Bringing it together
For most community club events, the fee-free path is straightforward: sell your tickets through a system that doesn't charge its own booking fee, take bank transfers for the members and locals who are happy to, and offer card payment through your club's own processor for everyone else. Do that, and the only money leaving the club is the unavoidable card fee on the card payments — not a cut of every ticket.
The result is simple: more of what your event raises stays with the club, where it belongs.
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