The line we would not cross
Three months before launch, our operations lead came into my office with a spreadsheet. A church in Birmingham had done the maths on what they'd lose to fees if they moved their conference ticket sales to our platform. The number was £2,400. I remember her saying, 'If we're going to ask them to switch, it has to be worth it.' That conversation didn't end in a pivot to our pricing. It ended in a promise: we would never charge more than 3%.
The precedent we wanted to break
When we started building Gathrd, the event platform landscape was already well-established. Eventbrite owns that space. They charge 6.95% of ticket revenue, plus 59p per ticket. I'm not criticising them; they've built an enormous, useful product. But they weren't built for churches. They weren't built for Gift Aid. They weren't built for the idea that a small Baptist chapel in Coventry should have the same fee structure as a 10,000-person music festival.
We looked at what faith communities were actually paying. A typical church running a prayer retreat might sell 80 tickets at £25 each. On Eventbrite, that's £139.20 in platform fees. On Gathrd, it's £60. The difference isn't incidental. That's a new projector, or funding the refreshments properly, or not having to squeeze an extra tenner onto the ticket price.
The decision to cap ourselves at 3% wasn't born from financial modelling showing we could afford it. It was born from refusing to build something that made church budgets tighter than they already are.
What 3% actually means
Setting a fee floor and refusing to cross it sounds simple. The practice was messier.
3% covers our payment processing (Stripe's cut), our infrastructure, our support team, and the ongoing work of keeping the directory faith-only and the features functional. It doesn't cover a wide margin. We've built the platform to run lean. We don't have a sales team phoning churches. We don't have a marketing budget for Super Bowl ads. We answer support emails ourselves most of the time.
But 3% also means every other decision has to serve that constraint. When a large conference organiser asked us to build a custom integration, we had to say no, because the project would have cost more to deliver than 3% of their ticket sales would ever pay back. When we considered offering discounted fees for non-profits, we realised it would put pressure on our own margins and potentially force us to raise fees elsewhere. So we didn't.
The 3% line made our roadmap actually harder, not easier. It meant saying no to things that would have generated revenue.
Gift Aid changed everything
The real breakthrough wasn't the fee itself. It was what we could do because of the 3% commitment.
UK churches lose thousands of pounds every year to Gift Aid claims that are never made, because the admin is painful. Someone has to match names, chase down declarations, manage the paperwork. Eventbrite doesn't solve this. Why would they? It's not their constituency.
We built Gift Aid split-checkout into Gathrd from the foundation. When a ticket buyer opts in at purchase, the Gift Aid claim happens automatically. The church gets the extra 25%, no chasing involved. We could only afford to do this well because we weren't bleeding 6.95% per ticket. The fee architecture had to serve the feature set we were promising.
That's not a bug. That's the contract: lower fees, features built specifically for how churches actually work.
The conversation we're still having
I still get emails from church organisers asking if we'd ever run a promotion with reduced fees for their first event, or if bulk bookings get a discount. The answer is always the same: the fee is the fee. 3%. No asterisks.
There's something clarifying about drawing a line that way. It stops conversations about whether you're trying to be cheap or discount or promotional. You're just trying to be fair to organisations that run on thin margins and serve their communities for reasons that aren't financial.
Bigger platforms have flexibility. They can offer strategic discounts and chase enterprise deals. We can't, and we don't want to. The simplicity of a single fee across every customer, every region, every event type, is something we've kept deliberately. No hidden charges. No plus symbol before a secondary figure. Just 3%.
What we learned
Two years in, I can tell you that the 3% decision was never about being the cheapest. Plenty of platforms could undercut that number if they decided to run at a loss or ignore their operational costs.
It was about aligning what we charge with who we're building for. Churches don't have venture capital in their back pocket. They don't expect frills. They expect honesty and tools that actually reduce their work.
When a church switches from Eventbrite to Gathrd, they should feel the difference in their bank balance at the end of the quarter. Not just because of the fee difference, but because Gift Aid claims happen without admin overhead, door check-in happens via QR code without a volunteer with a clipboard, and they're not listing their prayer meeting next to a nightclub in a shared directory.
The 3% line wasn't a starting position we negotiated down from. It was a commitment. The fact that we haven't moved it in two years isn't stubbornness. It's the thing we promised churches we wouldn't do.
What would you change about how event platforms charge faith communities? More importantly, what would you need to see from a platform before you'd ask your church to make the switch?
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