A festival trusted us with over $300,000 in ticket sales. Today, Stubs is open to everyone.

A few years ago I had an idea for an event ticketing company. Not another checkout page — a platform that would do three things well: help organizers run their events, sell tickets without friction, and make check-in fast enough that nobody misses the opening act standing in a line. Because the real product of an event isn't the transaction — it's the memories. The software should serve that, not skim it.

Then a festival trusted us — early, when trusting a new platform is a genuine risk. We helped them sell over $300,000 in tickets: general admission, VIP passes, discount codes, the whole mix. Multi-tier pricing, promo codes, and check-in at the door weren't roadmap slides — they ran at festival scale, with real money and a real venue on the line.

That number is also where the pricing conversation gets uncomfortable. On a typical percentage platform, 3.7% of $300,000 is over $11,000 — before the per-ticket service fee even stacks on top. Big percentage-based ticketing fees are a tax on doing well: sell more, lose more. Your success is priced as their upside.

Why organizers put up with it

Because the alternatives are worse in different ways. Build your own checkout and you're suddenly maintaining payment infrastructure instead of booking acts. Use the big platforms and the fees hide until the final checkout screen — where your attendees see them and blame you. Your money sits in someone else's account until after the event, while your vendors want deposits now. And the "analytics" answer the platform's questions, not yours — you find out how the event really went when it's too late to change anything.

So here's the whole pitch

Stubs charges one small fee per ticket sold — about half what the big platforms take. One line on the invoice, not a stack. Free tickets are free. Run the math on your own event: 500 tickets at $40 costs about $900 on Stubs. On a typical percentage platform, the same event costs over $1,600. That difference is a better headliner — or just money that stays with the people who actually did the work.

The rest of the product came from that festival, and from watching organizers work. Your event page goes live in minutes — pick a date, set your tickets, publish. No code, no designer, no "contact sales." General admission, VIP tiers, discount codes: the same setup that moved $300,000 works for a 40-person workshop. Sales appear on your dashboard the second they happen, so you can tell whether Thursday's post actually moved tickets while there's still time to act on it. Check-in is built for the door — scan, confirm, next — because the line is part of the experience too. And payouts move fast, because it was never our money to sit on.

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Stubs is a small team, and this is launch week. There are platforms with more features than us — we're fine with that. What we won't do is treat your success as our payday. If something's broken or missing, tell me directly; I read everything.

— Frank