Bundles and time-based pricing
Two features that exist mostly to save you from setting an alarm. Between them they cover the majority of what organizers otherwise do by hand at inconvenient hours: packaging tickets together, and changing prices on a schedule.
Bundles
A bundle sells several ticket types together at one price. The usual shapes are a weekend pass covering three day tickets, a two-for-one, or a workshop plus dinner — anything where the thing you want to sell is a package but the thing you need to control is the individual tickets underneath it.
The buyer sees a single product and pays a single price. You still get the underlying tickets, each with its own QR code, so the door behaves normally and your capacity counts stay honest. A weekend pass sold as a bundle correctly consumes one Friday ticket, one Saturday ticket and one Sunday ticket — which means Saturday can sell out, and the bundle stops being available, without you noticing manually.
That last point is the reason bundles are worth using at all instead of just creating a "Weekend Pass" ticket type with its own quantity. A standalone pass has its own separate allocation, so you can sell 100 passes and 300 Saturday tickets into a room that holds 350 and find out at the door.
Bundles and discounts
Discount codes apply to bundles. The bundle price is computed first, and the discount comes off that — not off the sum of the individual tickets, which is a different and larger number. A 10% code on a €90 weekend pass that would cost €120 as three separate tickets takes €9, not €12. This is the arithmetic you intended when you set the bundle price, and it is easy to get wrong in the other direction.
Time-based pricing rules
A pricing rule changes a ticket's price on a schedule: early bird until a date, then standard, then a late rate. You set it up once and it takes effect on its own.
The alternative — editing prices manually when the early bird ends — is worse than it sounds. The deadline is almost always midnight, so either you are awake for it or your early-bird price runs several hours long. And whichever hour you actually make the change, the price on the event page and the price at checkout must never disagree, even briefly. A scheduled rule closes that window entirely.
Only one rule applies at a time
When several rules could apply, the highest-priority active one wins. Rules do not stack, combine or compound. This is a deliberate design choice: stacked pricing rules are how a 20% early bird and a 15% member rate silently become a 32% discount that nobody approved.
The price a buyer sees on the event page is the price checkout charges. There is no second calculation at payment time that could produce a different answer.
A worked example
A typical conference ladder looks like this:
- Super early bird — €149, until 31 January
- Early bird — €199, until 31 March
- Standard — €249, until the week of the event
- Late / on the door — €299
Set once in January, that runs itself until the event. You do not touch it again, and there is no night on which the wrong price is live.
What to watch
A price change does not alter tickets already sold. Somebody who bought at the early rate keeps it — which is what they expect, what your refund maths assumes, and what makes the whole ladder credible. If a price increase retroactively repriced existing bookings, early-bird pricing would not be a discount, it would be a trap.
Two practical notes. First, an increase that arrives with no warning converts worse than one you announced; the deadline is the marketing, so tell people about it. Second, a price ladder is only honest if you actually hold the line — a "late rate" that quietly reverts to the early price when sales are slow teaches your regulars to wait, and next year they will.