For bands · from a fan
Sell your own tickets. Keep the fee.
A ticket is a product with a date, a limit and a code that opens a door once. The store does all three. For your own shows there is no reason a company should take a fifth of what your fans pay.
What it costs, per ticket
| Sold through | Fan pays | You keep, each | Over 150 | What the difference is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your own store | $18.00 | $17.18 | $2576.70 | Stripe's card fee. Nothing else, no monthly charge. |
| A flat-fee ticketing site | $18.75 | $16.43 | $2464.20 | About 75¢ a ticket plus card processing, sometimes a monthly fee too. |
| A percentage platform | $20.69 | $14.72 | $2208.30 | Around 3.7% + $1.79 to the platform, and the fan pays a booking fee on top. |
| Ticketmaster | $21.78 | $17.18 | $2576.70 | About 21% in service and facility fees, paid by the fan. The 2026 settlement's 15% cap covers only Live Nation's own amphitheatres, and is still under court review. |
The fan’s column is what they actually pay at checkout. On a sold-out room the gap between the first row and the last is what the fan saves, not only what you keep.
How it works
Add the show to your store.
A product with a
showblock: venue, city, date, doors, and how many you can fit. The capacity is the limit; the store stops selling when it’s reached and refuses to sell a show that has already happened.Fans buy it like a shirt.
Same checkout, same Apple Pay, same receipt. The price on the page is the price they pay: there is no fee added at the last screen, because there is nobody to add one.
They keep the ticket on their phone.
They open
/tickets, type the email they bought with, and get a big code for each ticket. Tell them to save the page before they leave home, so it works when the venue has no signal.You work your own door.
Whoever’s on the door opens the store’s door page on a phone and types the code. Green means let them in, red means already used, and the buyer’s name is right there. Each code works once and can’t be invented. Dark screen, big letters, one hand.
What the venue needs, before you ask them
The contract isn’t the whole story, and at a small room it usually isn’t the story at all. A venue’s box office has to close one equation on the night: unsold + comps + sold = the room’s capacity. A ticket you sold that isn’t in their count is a body with no row in it. That is what they are actually protecting.
Three things hang off that count, and none of them is about fees. The fire marshal can ask what the headcount is, and many liability policies exclude a night the room went over. The settlement starts from the drop count, the number who actually walked in, not the number sold. And the door has to check ID and wristband every person whatever their ticket looks like.
It has gone wrong exactly this way. At a Fort Worth ballroom in December, four businesses sold tickets to one show with no shared count. The room held 1,670 and the fire marshal estimated 2,000 inside, with 200 to 300 still outside. The event was shut down and people who had paid in advance never got in. Nobody in that story was a villain. There was just no single list.
So the question to ask a venue isn’t “can I sell my own tickets.” It’s “how do my tickets get into your count?” Ask it that way and you’re solving their problem instead of adding one.
Where this stops
A venue with an exclusive ticketing contract. No software gets around a contract the room already signed, and the language is broader than most bands expect. A standard AXS agreement requires the client to place the entire manifest of tickets on the platform and forbids any third-party system for the sale or issuance of tickets. The carve-outs that exist are for the venue’s own box office and for comps, and they stop applying the moment a ticket is sold for value. A band’s own store sells for value. There is no artist carve-out in that contract.
Arenas and most mid-size rooms are spoken for that way. Two things soften it at the bottom of the market. Many small rooms have no exclusive at all, or a loose arrangement they can work around. And artists have historically been allocated a slice of the house for their own presale, which is a real precedent, though it runs inside the venue’s system rather than outside it.
What isn’t spoken for: your own shows, record releases, house shows, all-ages spaces, DIY venues, a room you rent yourself, and a great many independent clubs that would rather not hand over the fee either. Ask before you assume, and ask about the count, not the contract.
Why the fees are what they are
Ticketmaster’s own figure for its share is 5 to 7% of the ticket; the rest of what a fan pays is the venue’s facility fee and a per-order charge. That stacks to about 21% on a typical order.
The March 2026 settlement with the Department of Justice caps service fees at 15% of face value, but read the fine print before you count on it: the cap covers Ticketmaster’s own sales at amphitheatres Live Nation owns or controls, not every venue on the platform, and the settlement is still going through Tunney Act review, so a judge has not signed it off. Analysts who read the deal do not expect what fans pay to fall much. On a $30 ticket, 15% is still $4.50 the fan pays and nobody plays a note for.
Card processing on that same ticket is about $1.17. The rest was the middle.
One honest caveat, because it decides whether a venue says yes. Not all of that fee is the ticketing company’s. The facility fee goes to the venue and the venue sets it, and it pays their staffing and insurance. Independent rooms run on very little: a NIVA survey found 64% of US independent venues were unprofitable in 2024, and UK grassroots venues have reported margins under 3%. On a full room the per-head fee can be close to the whole night’s profit. If you keep it, they lose it. That is a negotiation to have out loud, not a thing to route around quietly.
Written by a fan.No affiliate links; nobody here is paid to name anyone.Fee figures gathered 26 Sep 2026 from Ticketmaster’s own statements, the DOJ settlement as filed (not yet approved), and the published rates of independent platforms.