The fee we chose, and why it matters for your church

The maths that started everything

When we started building Gathrd, I made a spreadsheet. Every platform does this. I mapped out what Eventbrite charges: 6.95% of the ticket price plus 59p per ticket. I modelled what that meant for a typical church event. A £10 ticket? Eventbrite takes 75p. A £25 conference ticket? That's £2.33 per person, gone.

Then I thought about what that meant in aggregate. A 300-person annual conference at £20 a ticket. Eventbrite's cut: £414. For a church running on fundraising and donations, that's real money. That's an extra speaker, better catering, or funds for ministry outreach that doesn't happen.

We made a decision early: our fee would be 3% on paid tickets, full stop. No per-ticket surcharge. No hidden processing fees buried in the terms. Just 3%. A £10 ticket costs you 30p. A £25 ticket, 75p. That's it.

The maths works because we're not Eventbrite. We're not building a platform for concerts and weddings and corporate away days. We're building for churches and faith communities. That focus meant we could build differently, charge differently, and serve differently.

Gift Aid changed what we had to do

The real turning point came when we started talking to UK churches about Gift Aid. Most of them use it. It's how they turn a £10 donation into £12.50 of charitable income. But Eventbrite doesn't touch Gift Aid. They take their fee, you take what's left, and the paperwork becomes yours to figure out.

We decided to build Gift Aid straight into Gathrd. Not as an afterthought. As part of the checkout. Churches list their event, tick a box for Gift Aid eligibility, and when someone buys a ticket, they see the option to add the declaration right there. The money splits cleanly into the charity's account and the Gift Aid claim account. No administrative burden. No spreadsheet nightmare on a Tuesday evening.

That meant we had to think differently about fees. If we're handling Gift Aid, if we're splitting payouts, if we're doing the compliance work that Eventbrite ignores, we needed a model that could sustain that. But we also knew we couldn't charge like they do. That would betray the whole purpose.

3% lets us cover our costs, build the features churches actually need, and still leave more money in the church's pocket than any of the alternatives.

The discovery we didn't expect

Six months in, we started getting messages from small churches that shocked us. They said things like, 'We're using Gathrd for events we never would have listed on Eventbrite because the fees made it pointless.' A prayer meeting with 40 people at £3 a head. A community outreach with suggested donation pricing. A youth group trip where the margins were always tiny.

Eventbrite's model prices out the small, the intimate, the grassroots. It's designed for events with big margins or bulk ticket sales. Faith communities run different. They run on volunteers. On tight budgets. On generosity, not profit.

That's when I realised the 3% fee wasn't just cheaper. It was enabling a different kind of event economy inside the church world. Events that wouldn't exist otherwise. Things that mattered locally, that served people who needed it, started happening because the platform fee wasn't an obstacle.

Why we didn't copy what works elsewhere

The honest answer is that Eventbrite's model does work. For Eventbrite. For their shareholders. They've optimised everything to extract value from every transaction. It's not malicious. It's just business.

But we're building something different. We're not trying to be Eventbrite for faith. We're trying to be the platform where churches think, 'Yes, this is built for us. This understands what we need.'

That means the fee structure is just one part. It's the QR check-in at the door that works offline because not every venue has reliable internet. It's the Gift Aid automation that saves someone two hours of admin. It's the faith-only directory where you're not scrolling past nightclub events to find a worship night. It's the denomination filters so a Baptist can find Baptist events, a Pentecostal can find theirs, but no one's locked out of discovering something new.

A low fee alone doesn't do that. It's the product built around it that matters.

What we learned about trust

The strangest thing happened when we launched with transparent pricing. Churches started telling other churches. Not because 3% is mathematically impressive, but because it felt honest. It felt like someone had sat down and said, 'What would actually help?' instead of 'How do we extract maximum value?'

Trust is slow to build. It's fast to lose. Every time a church organiser sees a clear, straightforward fee with no surprises, they trust us a little bit more. Every time a pastor realises we've built Gift Aid in because we knew it mattered to them, not because we could upsell it as an add-on, that trust compounds.

We're not trying to be the cheapest platform. We're trying to be the one that churches choose because we've clearly put them first. The fee is just the visible part of that philosophy.