Free event ticketing software: 7 options and their real fees
Free event ticketing software is the right choice for a lot of events. A community night, a workshop, a small gig, a school play: you need a page people can book from online, a ticket in their inbox and a list at the door, and a free event ticketing system such as Eventbrite, Humanitix, Ticket Tailor or Luma does that well. If you want to host it yourself, pretix, Hi.Events and alf.io are open source.
The short version: all four hosted options below are free for free events, and all four take a fee on each paid ticket, with card processing on top. The comparison table shows what that fee is for each.
Ticketing is free in an unusual way, though. Many platforms charge no subscription at all. They take a fee on each paid ticket, often passed on to the buyer, and some charge nothing for free events. That is a good deal for many organisers and an expensive one for others, depending on your ticket price and how many you sell.
This page covers seven named options, the four kinds of free, the decisions to make before you choose, what free options usually leave out, and six tests to run before a single ticket goes on sale.
Free event ticketing systems compared
Fees below are from each vendor's own pricing page, checked on 1 November 2026. They change, so check again before you publish an event. US dollar figures are the US rates; Ticket Tailor's page lists pounds.
| Option | Free events | Fee on each paid ticket | Card processing | Who pays the fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | No fee | 3.7% + $1.79 | 2.9% per order | Buyer by default; you can absorb it |
| Humanitix | No fee | 2.1% + $0.99 (charities and schools 1% + $0.99) | 2.9% + $0.30 | Buyer by default; absorb, split or make it optional |
| Ticket Tailor | No fee up to 5,000 free tickets a year | £0.60 + VAT, flat, pay as you go (lower if you prepay) | Charged by your own Stripe, PayPal or Square account | Your choice: absorb it or add a booking fee |
| Luma | No fee, unlimited events and guests | 5% on the free plan; 0% on Luma Plus ($59 a month, billed yearly) | Stripe, typically 2.9% + $0.30, on top | Not stated on the pricing page |
What the fee is on one ticket, before card processing, worked from the rates above:
| Ticket price | Eventbrite | Humanitix | Luma (free plan) | Ticket Tailor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10 | $2.16 | $1.20 | $0.50 | £0.60 + VAT |
| $20 | $2.53 | $1.41 | $1.00 | £0.60 + VAT |
| $50 | $3.64 | $2.04 | $2.50 | £0.60 + VAT |
A percentage-only fee is cheapest on a cheap ticket, and a fixed fee gets cheaper as a share of the price as the ticket gets dearer. "Free" here means no subscription: on a paid ticket somebody always pays, and when the fee is passed on, it is your buyer.
Free ticketing for small events
For a small event, the free events column is the whole story if your tickets cost nothing: all four list free events at no charge. For a small paid event, look at the fee on your actual ticket price in the second table, and at what you need on the night. A small event rarely needs reserved seats or a box office, so the gaps covered further down matter less. What still matters at any size is the door: test the scan and the attendee export (tests 3 and 6 below) before the night. For a single small event with one way to pay, a form and a spreadsheet can also work; see event ticketing in Excel.
Open source event ticketing software
If you would rather run the software yourself, three open-source projects were all under active development when we checked their public repositories on 1 November 2026:
| Project | Licence | Note |
|---|---|---|
| pretix | AGPLv3, with additional terms | The licence file adds terms for running it as a service for others; read it first |
| Hi.Events | AGPLv3 | The licence requires keeping a "Powered by Hi.Events" credit on pages and emails |
| alf.io | GPL-3.0 |
Open source removes the per-ticket platform fee, not card processing, and it hands you the hosting, the updates and the onsale load. That trade is covered under self-hosted in the next section. We left out older projects whose repositories have seen no commits for years.
The four kinds of free
1. A ticketing platform that charges per ticket
A hosted platform with no subscription. You list the event for free, and the platform takes a fee on each paid ticket, sometimes on top of payment processing.
What it costs you: the fee, and the buyer. On cheap tickets the fee is a large share of the price. And the buyer checks out on the platform's page, so check who owns the attendee list, whether you can export it, and when the money reaches you. Some platforms pay out only after the event.
2. A plugin on your own website
A free ticketing plugin for the website or online shop you already run.
What it costs you: the add-ons, and the load. The free plugin sells a ticket. Scanning apps, reserved seating and capacity across several dates are often paid extensions. And on a busy onsale, the traffic lands on your website's hosting.
3. Open source, self-hosted
Ticketing software you install and run yourself, with no per-ticket fee beyond payment processing.
What it costs you: operations, at the worst possible moment. The heaviest load a ticketing system sees is the minute a popular event goes on sale, and on a self-hosted system that minute is your problem. So is the scanner on the door.
4. A form and a spreadsheet
A booking form, a payment link, and a spreadsheet as the door list. It holds up for a single small event with one sales channel. We cover how to set it up properly, and exactly where it breaks on the night, in event ticketing in Excel.
Three decisions to make first
General admission or reserved seats? General admission is a number: capacity, sold, remaining. Reserved seating is a map, where every seat is its own piece of inventory and two buyers must never get the same one. Many free options handle the first well. Fewer handle the second.
Online only, or the door too? If you sell at a door or box office as well as online, both draw on the same capacity and have to be counted together, as the sales happen. Selling from two lists is how events oversell.
One date or many? A show running for ten nights is ten separate pieces of inventory. A ticket for Friday must not get anyone in on Saturday.
Which kind of free fits your event
| Your event | Best kind of free | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Free community event | A platform that charges nothing for free events | Who owns the attendee list |
| Occasional paid event, one date | A per-ticket platform | The fee as a share of a cheap ticket |
| A venue selling every week | A plugin, a self-hosted system, or a paid plan | Door sales, and the load at onsale time |
| Reserved seating or a long run of dates | Rarely free | Seat maps, and capacity per date |
What free options usually leave out
We keep a hand-counted inventory of what ticketing and box-office products ship, built from 100 products:
| Capability | Products (of 100) |
|---|---|
| Online payment, manual tender and payment state | 96 |
| Sales, inventory, attendance and operational reports | 91 |
| Ticket validation, check-in and admission | 84 |
| Public event page, ticket selection and checkout | 80 |
| Orders, attendees and admission records | 78 |
| Box-office, counter and door sales | 74 |
| Ticket generation, delivery and recovery | 70 |
| Events, dates and lifecycle state | 66 |
| Ticket prices, quantities and sale inventory | 60 |
| Reserved, table and section seating | 55 |
| Refunds, cancellations and postponements | 45 |
| Order search, resend, exchange and reissue | 33 |
| Passes, packages and seasons | 24 |
| Onsale windows, presales and access codes | 21 |
| Offline scanning and sync | 7 |
Selling tickets and scanning them sit at the top, and free options usually cover both. What they tend to leave out:
Reserved seating. 55 of the 100 document it. On free options it is often missing or a paid extension.
Door sales. 74 of the 100 document box-office and door sales. Whatever the software costs, taking card payments at a door usually needs a card reader and a payments account.
Everything after the sale. Refunds, cancellations and postponements are documented by 45 of the 100. The desk where staff search orders, resend a lost ticket, move a buyer to another night or reissue a forwarded ticket appears in only 33. The market documents this part far less than selling and scanning, so do not assume a free option has it, and it is where a show night goes wrong.
Test free ticketing software in an afternoon
Run these six with a test event before you put a single real ticket on sale.
- Sell the last ticket twice. Set capacity to one and buy it in two browsers at the same moment. One purchase should fail. If both succeed, the system checks availability and takes the order as two separate steps, and on a sold-out night that gap is someone turned away at the door.
- Sell online and at the door at once. If you will sell in both places, set a small capacity and sell through both. The remaining count should agree everywhere.
- Scan the same ticket twice. The second scan should be refused as already admitted, with the time of the first. Then scan a ticket for a different date. It should be refused as the wrong night.
- Refund a ticket, then scan it. It should be refused. A refund that returns the money and leaves the ticket working is a free ticket.
- Scan with the phone offline. Switch on flight mode and scan. Either the scanner keeps admitting and reconciles afterwards, or it tells you clearly that it cannot check. Only 7 of the 100 products say publicly how they handle this, so find out before the night.
- Export the attendee list and the orders. If you cannot get your buyers' details out, they are not your buyers.
Five mistakes that show up at the door
A door list printed too early. A list printed before sales close is missing the last buyers, who then arrive with a valid ticket and are not on it. Print or download it after sales stop.
No plan for the buyer who cannot find their ticket. Every event has one, at the front of the queue. Decide how staff find an order by name or email, and whether they can reissue a ticket on the spot. This is the order desk that only 33 of the 100 products document.
One scanner for the whole crowd. Most of an audience arrives in the half hour before the start. Time how many people one scanner admits in a minute, and staff the door for the peak, not the average.
A refund policy the system cannot carry out. Put the policy where people pay, and check the software can do what it promises. If you offer exchanges to another night and the system cannot move a ticket between dates, every exchange becomes a manual refund and resale, usually on show night.
Postponing by editing the date. If a show moves, changing the event's date in place can leave the tickets, the emails and the door list saying different things. Use the system's postponement or exchange, so every ticket moves with the show and every buyer is told.
Moving off a spreadsheet without losing anything
Start with an event that is not on sale yet. Moving an event mid-sale means two places holding the same capacity, which is how events oversell.
Set capacity per date, and take comps out of it. Guest list, staff and press tickets should come out of the same capacity, not sit on top of it.
Rehearse the door. Scan test tickets on the phones you will use, at the venue, on its signal. A door plan tested at a desk has not been tested.
When free stops being free
When the per-ticket fee passes what a flat plan would cost. At a higher ticket price or a higher volume, a fee on every ticket can cost more than a subscription or a self-hosted system. Do the sum at your real numbers.
The sum takes a minute. A per-ticket fee is usually a percentage of the price plus a fixed amount. Multiply it by the tickets you sell in a year and compare the total with a year of the alternative. With illustrative figures, a fee of 3% plus £0.60 on a £12 ticket is £0.96 per ticket, and at 2,000 tickets a year that is £1,920. Passing the fee to the buyer does not make it disappear. It becomes part of the price your audience sees.
When you need reserved seats, or several dates each with their own capacity.
When you sell at the door, and need a box office that shares inventory with the website.
The option worth considering at that point
For most events, a ticketing platform is the right answer, and the per-ticket model means you pay only when you sell. Building your own starts to make sense for a venue or promoter running events every week, where the fees add up and the box office is a daily tool rather than a once-a-year one.
A coding agent can build a ticketing system in days, and the demo will convince you: pick a night, pay, receive a ticket. What it tends to leave out is what the tests above check: capacity decided in the same step as the payment, a refund that voids the ticket, a scan that admits once. When four AI models built the same ticketing specification, the board was scored on three of those: whether the last seat can be sold twice, whether a refunded ticket still gets in, and whether the door can tell a duplicate from a valid entry.
Common questions
Is there completely free event ticketing software? For free events, yes: Eventbrite, Humanitix, Ticket Tailor (up to its yearly allowance) and Luma all list free events at no charge. For paid tickets, every hosted option above takes a per-ticket fee plus card processing, usually passed on to the buyer. Open-source software removes the platform fee but not card processing or hosting.
What is the best free ticketing system for small events? It depends on your ticket price. On the rates above, a $10 ticket costs $0.50 in fees on Luma's free plan, $1.20 on Humanitix and $2.16 on Eventbrite, before card processing. If tickets are free, any of the four works, so choose on the door: scanning and the attendee export.
Is there open source event ticketing software? Yes. pretix (AGPLv3 with additional terms), Hi.Events (AGPLv3) and alf.io (GPL-3.0) are open source and were actively developed when we checked on 1 November 2026. You host them yourself, which means you also carry the onsale traffic and the updates.
Can I sell tickets online for free? You can list them for free and pay nothing up front, but each paid ticket carries a platform fee and a card fee on hosted platforms. Passing the fee to the buyer keeps more of the ticket price with you, at the cost of a higher price at checkout.
If you do build with a coding agent, the Event Ticketing planner is the specification we hand ours. You can sign in to the two builds we host before deciding anything.