Why we built Gathrd with a 3% platform fee

The math that made us uncomfortable

When we started designing Gathrd, we had to answer a hard question: what should we actually charge? Our team spent a Friday afternoon with a spreadsheet, real numbers from three different churches, and the uncomfortable realisation that the standard event-ticketing model was built for nightclubs and festivals, not faith communities.

Here's what we found. A typical church running a weekend conference with 200 paid tickets at £15 each = £3,000 revenue. On Eventbrite, after their 6.95% platform fee plus 59p per ticket, the church nets £2,761. That's £239 gone. The administrators we spoke to weren't complaining about the cost in isolation. They were frustrated that they were subsidising a platform built for use cases nothing like theirs.

We decided on 3%. A church running that same conference would keep £2,910. The difference isn't huge on paper. But it shifts something psychological. The platform stops feeling like a tax on your ministry and starts feeling like a fair transaction. You're paying for something that actually works for you.

Why lower fees matter for Gift Aid

The real story isn't just the percentage. It's what happens after the donation comes through.

In the UK, churches can reclaim Gift Aid on charitable donations. A £15 ticket becomes worth 19p more to the church through Gift Aid reclaim. But Eventbrite doesn't integrate with Gift Aid. Organisers have to manually split their accounting, track which attendees claimed Gift Aid, and submit paperwork separately. Most don't bother. Most churches leave that money on the table.

We built Gathrd with a split-checkout. When someone books a ticket, they can mark it as a Gift Aid donation in the same transaction. The money flows to your Stripe account, Gift Aid gets flagged in our system, and we generate the paperwork you need for HMRC. One flow. One platform.

Lower fees aren't just about saving money. They're about making the whole process feel like it was designed for you, not retrofitted around you.

A platform that stays in its lane

During week two of beta testing, a church staff member asked if they could list their worship night alongside their secular quiz night on the same platform. We said no. And that decision lives in everything we've built since.

Gathrd is faith-only by policy. That means a teenager looking for events near them will find prayer meetings, conferences, worship nights, and community gatherings. They won't find a nightclub listing that happened to be categorised under 'events near me'. We'll never list a secular concert next to a church service just to inflate our event count.

That constraint affects everything. It affects how we filter by denomination. It affects how we build the directory. It affects the kind of partners we approach and the platforms we integrate with. A lower fee structure makes sense if you're purpose-built for a specific community, not trying to be all things to all people.

Some platforms will tell you they do everything. We're more interested in doing one thing well.

What 3% actually buys you

It's worth being honest about what the fee covers. It's not just a percentage taken off your revenue. It's payment processing, hosting, the Stripe Connect integration that puts money directly into your bank account, the QR check-in system that works offline, the NFC door reader integration via TapTrust if you want it, the mobile apps, the discovery site, and the people actually maintaining the system.

We offer different plans. Church plan runs £19.99 a month. Ministry plan is £49.99. Conference plan £149.99. But across every plan, the platform fee on paid tickets stays at 3%. There's no hidden charge per ticket. There's no 'convenience fee'. There's no surge pricing during peak booking windows.

What you pay for a ticket goes straight to your Stripe account. Minus 3%. That's the deal.

The conversation we keep having

We've been live for six months now. The feedback loop is sharp. Every week we hear from organisers who've switched from Eventbrite, and almost every message includes a version of the same observation: 'I didn't realise how much we were losing until we switched.'

One Baptist church in London saved £340 on a single baptism service because the fee was lower and they didn't need to pay per-ticket charges. A retreat organiser calculated that our Gift Aid integration recovered £680 they'd previously missed. A conference organiser said the QR check-in system alone saved them three hours of manual work.

These aren't testimonials. They're just what happens when you build something for a specific community instead of trying to be a generic solution with faith-community features bolted on.