EventMann

"When do I get the money" deserves a straight answer, including — especially including — the part that is deliberately not immediate. Here is the whole of it.

Your own account, not ours

You connect your own Stripe account, and ticket money is routed to it as sales happen. It is your account, your bank details, your Stripe dashboard.

This is a structural difference from platforms that collect payments into their own account and pay you out later. In that model your money is on somebody else's balance sheet and your ability to be paid depends on their solvency and their goodwill. Here it never enters ours.

Practically, it means you can log into Stripe and see your own transactions, your own balance and your own payout history, without asking us anything.

Held until your event has happened

Funds stay in your connected balance until your event takes place, and then are released to your bank.

This is the part organizers ask about, so here is the honest reasoning. It is not us being slow with your money — we never hold it. It is what makes refunds work at all.

A refund pulls from your Stripe balance. If ticket money has already been swept into a personal or business bank account and spent on deposits, marketing and staff — which is exactly what it is for — then a cancelled event leaves attendees owed refunds that cannot be funded. At that point there are only bad options: the organizer finds the money from somewhere, the attendees are not refunded, or somebody else absorbs it. Every ticketing collapse you have read about has this shape.

Holding until delivery means the money to refund an event that does not happen is still there when it is needed. It is a consumer protection, and it is also protection for you: an organizer whose event is cancelled by a venue is in a far better position with the ticket money intact than without it.

What actually releases the payout

Once your event has ended, a release runs and checks:

the event has ended, not merely started;
a short buffer has passed since it ended — the window in which an attendee realises something went wrong;
there are no open disputes on the event;
there is some evidence the event ran, which in practice means check-ins;
your account is in good standing.

This applies to every organizer, not only new ones. A rule that exempts established accounts is a rule that fails in the one case where the loss is largest.

The check-in signal is the reason to scan tickets at the door even for a small, friendly event: it is how the platform knows your event happened. For very small attendee counts the signal is treated as noise and is not required — a workshop for six is not held up because nobody scanned.

You are the merchant

Your business is the merchant of record. Concretely:

Your business name appears on the buyer's card statement, which reduces chargebacks — a line item nobody recognises is a line item somebody disputes.
Stripe bills its processing fee to your account directly. We are not in the middle of it and we do not mark it up.
Refunds and chargebacks come out of your balance. They are yours, as they would be for any other business selling to the public.

That last point is the other reason the money waits until your event is behind you. A chargeback arriving against an empty balance is a debt; against a held balance it is a deduction.

Getting paid at all

To sell paid tickets you must complete Stripe's onboarding: identity, business details, a bank account, and card payments enabled on your account.

That is Stripe's verification, not a form we invented, and it is what makes you payable. It is also the reason a paid event cannot go live until it is done — including if you schedule the event rather than publishing it directly, which is not a way around the check.

The most common snag is an account that was connected before card payments were requested and holds only the transfers capability. Such an account cannot be the merchant on a charge, so paid checkout is refused rather than quietly falling back to us paying for your event. The fix is to reconnect, and your Stripe settings page will tell you if this applies to you.

Free events

None of this applies to free events. There is no money, no Stripe account required, no commission and no hold. If you only ever run free events you never have to think about any of it.

When you actually get paid