Pricing
Free for the venue. Funded by a 6% booking fee.
No monthly fee. No setup fee. No hosting charge. No contract. Stage is free for theatres, concert halls, and performing arts organizations — we’re paid by a single 6% booking fee the customer sees on their ticket. That’s it.
Venue cost
$0
No monthly fee, no setup fee, no per-user seat fee, no hosting charge. Ever.
Booking fee
6%
Charged to the patron at checkout, itemised on the receipt. You never pay us.
Payment processing
Pass-through
Your own processor (Stripe recommended; Square and others supported). You pay the same card fees you’d pay anywhere else — we don’t upcharge.
One plan. Everything included.
No feature gates. No paid add-ons.
Every venue on Stage gets the whole platform from day one. Community theatres and performing arts centres both run on the same stack; the only thing that scales is the number of tickets you sell.
The one honest exception
On-demand video: billed at cost
On-demand streaming carries a cloud-storage and bandwidth charge that scales with how much content you host and how many patrons watch. Stage passes that through at the underlying cloud provider’s rate — typically pennies per gigabyte-month and cents per hour of viewing — with zero markup on our side. You only pay it when you use it.
Why this pricing works
Aligned incentives, not a sales quota.
The venue pays nothing
No monthly subscription. No per-user seat fee. No hosting charge. No setup or training invoice. Sign up, import your season, and open the box office on opening night.
The customer covers the cost
A 6% booking fee is added to each ticket at checkout — clearly itemised alongside taxes and Stripe’s card fee. Patrons already expect a booking fee, and ours is well below the industry average.
You keep 100% of ticket revenue
Every dollar of face value, every subscription, every donation, every gift card flows straight to the venue’s own processor account (Stripe recommended; Square and others supported) — we never touch the ticket revenue.
Frequently asked
The honest answers.
- Is Stage really free for venues?
- Yes. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no hosting charge, no per-user seat licence, no training invoice. Every feature — reserved seating, season subscriptions, donations, memorial seats, streaming, CRM, promo codes, multi-venue — is included from day one.
- How is Stage paid, then?
- A flat 6% booking fee is added to each ticket at checkout. The customer sees it clearly itemised next to taxes and the Stripe card fee. We only get paid when you sell a ticket, which keeps our incentives aligned with yours.
- Is 6% competitive?
- Most ticketing platforms charge the patron 8–15% before they start charging the venue a monthly fee on top. A venue paying $500/month plus 10% per ticket on legacy software is the norm, not the exception. 6% to the patron, $0 to the venue, is meaningfully lower than everyone we compete with.
- Who collects the ticket revenue?
- You do. Every ticket, subscription, donation, and gift card goes straight into the processor account you connect — Stripe (recommended, via Stripe Connect), Square, or another supported processor. We never custody your funds, and we don’t upcharge card fees.
- Do free shows or $0 tickets cost me anything?
- No. The booking fee is only applied to paid tickets. Free events, comp tickets, and $0 reservations are 100% free to run on Stage.
- What about donations?
- We don’t charge a booking fee on donations. 100% of every donation flows to the venue — minus your processor’s card fee, which is the same whether you’re on Stage or not.
- Is anything else metered or variable?
- Only on-demand video streaming, and we pass it through at cost. Cloud storage and bandwidth for stream delivery is billed to you at the provider’s rate (typically pennies per GB-month plus a small per-view delivery fee) with zero markup from Stage. If you don’t run on-demand content, you never see this line item.
- Can I absorb the booking fee on the venue side?
- Yes. If you’d rather bake the fee into face value — so the ticket reads $32 all-in rather than $30.21 + fees — you can toggle that per show in Stage settings. The math works out the same for us.
- Is there a contract or minimum?
- No contract, no minimum ticket volume, no exit fee. Export your patron data and instance calendar any time — it’s your data, not ours.
Launch your season in an afternoon.
Import your venue, upload your show list, wire up Stripe, and open the box office. If you sell a ticket on day one, you didn’t pay us a cent to do it.
The math
On a $32 ticket the customer pays a $1.92 booking fee. You receive the full $32 face value (less your own processor’s card fee — we don’t upcharge it). Your monthly cost on Stage stays the same whether you sell one ticket or one hundred thousand: $0.