Registration that doesn't take a cut

Most event platforms make money every time someone buys a ticket to your event. Not a fixed amount — a percentage. The more your ticket costs, the more they take. That pricing model deserves more scrutiny than it gets.

The maths on percentage fees

Eventbrite charges 3.7% + $1.79 per ticket. For a $200 conference ticket, that's $9.19 per registration. Run a 500-person conference and you're handing over $4,595 in platform fees before you've paid for coffee.

Scale it up and the numbers get worse. A 2,000-person event at $300 a ticket? That's $24,380 in fees. For registration processing. Not payment processing — Stripe handles that separately. Just the privilege of using the platform to collect registrations.

Other platforms are less transparent about it. Some bake fees into opaque per-registration tiers where you can't easily work out what each registration actually costs. Some bundle it into "enterprise pricing" that conveniently scales with your ticket revenue. The structure varies, but the principle is the same: the platform's revenue is tied to your ticket price.

Why percentage pricing doesn't make sense

Processing a $50 registration and a $500 registration costs the platform the same amount. The same form gets submitted. The same confirmation email goes out. The same record gets created in the database. The same QR code gets generated for check-in.

Nothing about the work changes when the ticket price goes up. But the fee does. That's not usage-based pricing — it's a revenue share disguised as a service fee.

For simple public ticketed events, you might not notice. A $20 comedy gig with 100 attendees? The fees are a rounding error. But for professional conferences, trade shows, and managed events — where ticket prices are higher and volumes are larger — the percentage model quietly becomes one of your biggest line items.

How ema prices registrations

ema uses a flat per-registration fee. Your $50 ticket and your $500 ticket cost the same to process. The fee is tied to the work the platform does, not the revenue your event generates.

This means the more expensive your event, the more you save compared to percentage-based models. And it means your registration costs are predictable — you can budget them before a single ticket sells.

Payments go through Stripe directly. Your attendees pay you, Stripe processes the transaction, and the money lands in your account. ema isn't sitting in the middle taking a cut of the transaction. We're not a payment processor and we don't pretend to be one.

Registration that connects to everything else

The real problem with standalone ticketing tools isn't just the pricing — it's the disconnection. You sell tickets in one system, manage your event in another, and spend hours reconciling data between them.

In ema, registration is part of the platform. Registrants automatically appear in your attendee list. Check-in works via QR codes tied to each registration. Attendance data feeds directly into reporting. And the AI agent can answer questions like "how many registrations came in this week?" or "what's our conversion rate on early-bird tickets?" in real time, because it has access to the live data.

No CSV exports. No manual syncing. No "let me check the other system and get back to you."

Where Eventbrite wins

Eventbrite has a massive public marketplace. If you're selling tickets to a gig, a workshop, or a public event where discoverability matters, that marketplace is genuinely valuable. People browse Eventbrite the way they browse a listings site. That distribution has real worth.

But for professional conferences, corporate events, and managed events — where your attendees aren't discovering you through a marketplace — you're paying percentage fees for distribution you don't need. You already know who your audience is. You're driving traffic to your own event site. The marketplace isn't part of the equation.

The bottom line

Registration processing is a commodity. Every platform can collect a name, an email, and a payment. The question is how much you're paying for it and whether it connects to the rest of your event workflow.

ema charges a flat fee per registration, routes payments directly through Stripe, and connects every registration to the rest of your event data. No percentage cut, no payment middleman, no data silos.

Your ticket revenue is yours. That shouldn't be a differentiator, but here we are.