What Stripe charges, and why it is separate from us

This is the most common confusion in ticketing pricing, and it is usually not an accident. Understanding it takes five minutes and is the single most useful thing you can do before comparing platforms.

There are two different fees

Every paid ticket sold anywhere online involves at least two charges, and they are collected by two different companies for two different things.

• Our commission — 1% per paid ticket, with a €0.20 floor and a €0.50 cap, and 0% until 31 December 2026. That is what you pay us for running the platform. Free events cost nothing at all, and there is no monthly fee.
• Stripe's card processing fee — charged by Stripe, to your account, at their published rate. We do not collect it, we do not see it as revenue, and we do not mark it up.

For a German organizer taking a European card, Stripe's standard rate at the time of writing is 1.5% + €0.25. Cards issued outside the EEA cost more, which is Stripe's pricing rather than ours — our fee calculator uses the rate for your country so the number you see is the one that applies to you.

Why the processing fee cannot be avoided

Somebody has to move money from a stranger's card into your bank account, across banks and card networks, with fraud checks, chargeback handling and regulatory obligations attached. That costs money on every platform in the world, including the ones that do not show it to you.

Which leads to the useful test. If a competitor quotes a single all-in percentage that is lower than Stripe's own rate, they have not found cheaper payments. They have folded processing into a number you cannot break down — which means you cannot check it, and cannot tell what happens when the underlying rate changes.

How to compare properly

Ask any platform two questions:

1. What is your commission?
2. What is the payment processing fee, and who charges it?

If the answer to the second is vague, that is the answer. Then do the arithmetic on a ticket price you actually sell, because percentages and fixed fees behave very differently across price points.

A €10 ticket carrying a €0.25 fixed fee loses 2.5% to that component alone; the same fixed fee on a €100 ticket is 0.25%. Any comparison done at "around €30" will mislead you if your real average is €12. Use your own number.

A worked example

A €40 ticket sold today by a German organizer to a European cardholder:

• Stripe: 1.5% of €40 = €0.60, plus €0.25 fixed = €0.85
• EventMann: €0.00 — our commission is 0% until 31 December 2026
• You receive: €39.15

The same ticket sold in 2027, once our commission applies:

• Stripe: €0.85
• EventMann: 1% of €40 = €0.40, within the €0.20–€0.50 band = €0.40
• You receive: €38.75

The cap is why the second number stops growing. A €200 ticket pays the same €0.50 as a €50 one, so our fee becomes a smaller share of the price as tickets get more expensive rather than a larger one.

Passing fees on, or not

You decide whether to absorb fees or add them to the ticket price at checkout. Both are normal, and which is better depends on your audience more than on the arithmetic.

Absorbing them means your advertised price is the price paid, which converts better and looks more honest on a poster. Passing them on keeps your net per ticket predictable, which matters when margins are thin.

Either way, the buyer sees the total before paying. There is no fee that appears only on the final screen. Surprise fees at the last step are the single most reliable way to lose a sale that was otherwise complete, and they are increasingly a regulatory problem in the EU as well as a commercial one.

Your Stripe rate is yours

One final point. Your actual Stripe rate depends on your own agreement with Stripe, not on anything we control. At volume, Stripe negotiates. If you are selling a great many tickets, that conversation is worth having, and it is a conversation you can have precisely because the processing relationship is directly yours rather than intermediated by us.