The 3% fee: what it costs to build for churches, not nightclubs
A church administrator emailed me last month asking a single question: 'Why 3%?' Not angry. Just curious. She'd been comparing Gathrd to Eventbrite and wanted to understand the difference. That email sat with me because it's a fair question, and I realised we'd never really explained it properly.
The math everyone asks about
Let's start with numbers, because that's usually where the conversation begins. On a £10 ticket sold through Gathrd, we take 30p. On Eventbrite, you'd pay 69.5p plus a 59p fixed fee per transaction. So yes, we're cheaper. But that's not actually the interesting part.
The interesting part is what happens with that 30p. When a church sells 200 tickets to their autumn conference through Gathrd, that's £60 in platform fees. That money goes toward the infrastructure that made those 200 people find the event in the first place. The QR code scanner that works offline. The Gift Aid calculator that splits the checkout so UK organisers don't leave money on the table. The fact that when someone opens Gathrd looking for events, they find a church worship night, not a nightclub advertising under the same category.
I didn't design a 3% fee because it was mathematically elegant. I designed it because when we launched, our cost to process payments, store event data, run the app on iOS and Android, and moderate a directory where every single listing is genuinely faith-focused, came out to roughly that. We could have cut corners. We didn't.
Why a faith-only directory costs money
This is the part that separates Gathrd from a generic events platform. When Eventbrite lists your church concert, it also lists the club night happening next door. Same category. Same algorithm. No distinction. That's fine for nightclubs. It's not what we built Gathrd for.
Our directory is curated. Every event that appears in Gathrd goes through a basic check. Is it actually a faith event? Does it belong in a space designed for people looking to connect with their church community? We turn down events that don't fit. That curation requires people. It requires thought. It costs money.
When a church admin tells me they use Gathrd because 'we don't have to worry about finding our event next to something that contradicts our values,' that's not an accident. It's built into our model. It's also why that 3% isn't just paying for technology; it's paying for a different kind of platform entirely.
What the fee actually funds
Here's what happens when you charge 3% on paid tickets. You can afford to keep community features completely free. Event listings don't cost your church anything. Attendees don't pay to browse. The only time money changes hands is when someone buys a ticket, and at that point, we take our cut.
You can integrate with payment processors like Stripe and keep payouts simple. You can build QR check-in that works without internet. You can add NFC card support through TapTrust for churches that want it. You can support denomination filtering so a Catholic looking for evening prayer finds Catholic events. You can run iOS and Android apps that don't ask people to watch ads or pay subscriptions just to discover what's happening near them.
You cannot do all that on zero revenue. You also cannot do it if you're trying to maximise profit at the expense of the community you serve. The 3% is the line where those two things meet. It covers what it costs to run a real platform. It doesn't subsidise venture capital or shareholder returns.
The conversation we should have been having
When that church admin asked 'Why 3%,' what she was really asking was 'Can I trust this?' Not trust us with her payment data. Trust us with the idea that we've thought about what churches actually need, and we're not going to change the terms next year when we need more growth.
We're transparent about the fee in every ticket sale. There's no hidden percentage. No 'processing fee' tacked on at checkout. No surge pricing because an event sold well. The 3% is the whole story.
We're also transparent about who we are. We're a UK app studio that built Gathrd because we saw churches struggling to fill events and struggling to find a booking platform that wasn't designed for comedy clubs and corporate conferences. The 3% reflects what it costs to serve that community well, not what we can extract from it.
A small thing that matters a lot
One more thing about the 3% that I think matters. If you're a small church running a community event, and you decide to charge admission to cover costs, our fee doesn't change. You're not paying a higher percentage just because you're smaller. You're not subsidising larger churches with volume discounts hidden in the algorithm. The economics are the same whether you're selling 50 tickets or 500.
That's intentional. We built Gathrd for every church, not just the megachurches that can negotiate their way into better rates elsewhere.
When someone asks you about Gathrd's 3% fee, you can tell them it's cheaper than alternatives. But more important: it's the cost of building something made for faith communities, not something retrofitted to them. Does that distinction matter to you?