You are putting a show on sale and four tabs are open: Skiddle, Fatsoma, Eventbrite and Ticket Tailor. Each one quotes its fee differently — a percentage here, a pence-per-ticket there, a monthly subscription somewhere else — and none of them makes it easy to answer the only question that matters: how much of each ticket actually reaches your bank account, and when?
This article puts the published UK fees side by side, checked against the best available sources in August 2026, and then covers what the fee comparison tables systematically leave out: payout timing, who owns your buyer data, and the UK pricing rules that now carry serious penalties. It is written from one promoter to another, not as a sales pitch — where a figure is uncertain or contested, we say so.
One caveat before the numbers: platform fees are perishable data. Every figure below should be re-verified against the platform's own pricing page before you build a budget on it.
The headline fees, platform by platform
Skiddle
Skiddle has been the UK's leading independent ticketing and discovery platform for music and nightlife since 2001, with over 260,000 organisers on its books. Its model works out at roughly 10% plus 25–27p per ticket, and the fee can be passed on to the buyer rather than absorbed by the organiser.
What you get for that is a genuine marketplace: Skiddle brings its own audience, event discovery, and promoter-facing features such as session-based ticketing, event series, RapidScan entry, payment plans, waiting lists and an official resale channel. What you give up is control — the buyer relationship, the checkout and the brand experience belong to Skiddle, not to you. And by default, Skiddle pays out after the event, which we will come back to.
Fatsoma
Fatsoma is the UK platform built around student events and club nights, with its distinctive network of "reps" — students who resell tickets socially on commission. On fees, there is a genuine discrepancy in the public record: Fatsoma's own partner help pages state a 10% booking fee, while the comparison site ticketingfees.co.uk lists 5% plus 49p. Both cannot be the whole story — the honest answer is that you should get a written quote for your specific event before publishing a budget.
What the comparators agree on: no set-up or monthly fee, and a faster payout than Skiddle. Where Fatsoma is thin is everything outside its core niche — there is little educational content for promoters, and limited support for mid-size festivals or anything requiring on-site infrastructure.
Eventbrite
Eventbrite is the global generalist. For the UK, 2026 comparison sources — ticketingfees.co.uk and popuppal.co.uk — put its standard rate at 6.95% plus £0.59 per paid ticket. Note that both are secondary sources: Eventbrite has revised its pricing repeatedly over the years, so treat this as a snapshot and confirm against its official organiser pricing page.
On paper that percentage undercuts Skiddle. In practice, Eventbrite's audience in the UK skews away from club nights and grassroots music, so the marketplace effect that partly justifies a marketplace fee is weaker for that kind of event.
Ticket Tailor
Ticket Tailor is the low-cost tool of the four: pricing 60p + VAT per ticket pay-as-you-go, with prepaid credits from 22p + VAT, according to ticketingfees.co.uk (Ticket Tailor's own site could not be independently fetched for this comparison, so verify directly). For a high-volume event with simple needs, the per-ticket maths can be dramatically cheaper than any percentage-based platform.
The trade-off is structural: Ticket Tailor is a tool, not a platform. There is no marketplace or discovery audience, no cashless or point-of-sale layer, and no account team. Promoters who grow tend to outgrow it.
The comparison at a glance (checked August 2026)
| Platform | Published fee (per paid ticket) | Source type | Payout timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skiddle | ~10% + 25–27p | Platform materials | After the event (default) |
| Fatsoma | 10% (own help pages) / 5% + 49p (comparators) | Contradictory — verify | Faster than Skiddle, per comparators |
| Eventbrite | 6.95% + £0.59 | Secondary sources | Verify per account |
| Ticket Tailor | 60p + VAT PAYG (credits from 22p + VAT) | Secondary source | Verify per account |
What the fee tables don't tell you
The dominant UK fee comparison site, ticketingfees.co.uk, is genuinely useful — but by its own admission it excludes merchant fees, and it does not weigh audience reach, features or payout terms. Those omissions are precisely where the real cost differences live.
Payout timing is a cash-flow decision, not a footnote
A platform that holds your money until after the event is, in effect, asking you to finance the entire production — artist deposits, venue hire, marketing — out of your own pocket. Skiddle's default of paying out post-event versus Fatsoma's reportedly faster payouts can matter more to a working promoter than a two-point difference in headline fee. Whatever platform you evaluate, get the payout schedule in writing, and ask specifically whether advance or staged payouts are available and on what conditions.
Who owns the buyer?
On a marketplace, the person who bought your ticket is, first and foremost, the marketplace's customer. Their email, their purchase history and the ability to remarket to them for your next event may not be fully yours. On a white-label or promoter-first platform, the audience data belongs to you. Over a season of events, the compounding value of owning your own audience routinely outweighs the fee difference between platforms — it is the difference between renting an audience and building one. If you are still weighing up models, our guide on how to choose a ticketing platform goes deeper on this trade-off.
Merchant fees and the "total cost per ticket"
Percentage-plus-pence booking fees are rarely the whole cost. Payment processing may be bundled or billed separately, and refund handling, chargebacks and add-on features can all move the real number. The only comparison that matters is: for *your* ticket price, at *your* expected volume, what lands in your account and on what date? We have written more broadly about what it really costs to sell tickets online if you want the full breakdown of cost categories.
The legal backdrop every UK promoter should know
Fees do not exist in a vacuum — how you display them is now regulated with real teeth.
Drip pricing is unlawful. Under UK consumer law, the price shown to the buyer must include all unavoidable charges from the start — you cannot advertise £10 and reveal £12.50 at checkout. This obligation is set out in Trading Standards guidance on the sale and resale of tickets, and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gives the CMA direct enforcement powers, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover. So when a platform lets you "pass the fee to the buyer", the full fee-inclusive price must still be visible from the first click. The CMA is not treating this as theoretical: in November 2025 it opened investigations into Viagogo and StubHub over mandatory fees and pressure-selling, as reported by Billboard.
Resale rules already bind you. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 (sections 90–91) requires secondary sellers to disclose face value, seat or area, and any usage restrictions, and the Breaching of Limits on Ticket Sales Regulations 2018 makes it a criminal offence to use bots to buy above per-buyer limits for resale — both summarised in the same Business Companion guidance. The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 additionally require clear pre-contract information for any online sale.
A face-value resale cap may be coming — but it is not law. The Government confirmed in the King's Speech its intention to ban resale above face value plus unavoidable fees, via a draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill that remains in pre-legislative scrutiny with no timetable, per the House of Commons Library briefing and analysis by Slaughter and May. If enacted, it would make controlled, official resale channels — rather than open secondary markets — the safe route for sold-out events. Watch this space; do not treat it as current law.
When you compare platforms, ask each one how it displays total prices, and what tools it gives you to run resale on your own terms rather than losing it to secondary sites.
One more variable: how UK fans actually pay
Checkout conversion is a hidden fee. UK Finance's Payment Markets Report 2025 records more than 26 billion debit card transactions in 2024 — just over half of all UK payments — and 57% of adults registered with a mobile wallet, up from 42% in 2023. By September 2025, digital wallets accounted for roughly 46% of UK online purchases, overtaking cards. The practical test: does the platform's checkout offer Apple Pay and Google Pay by default, and is it optimised for debit-first buyers? A cheaper platform with a clunkier checkout can cost you more in abandoned baskets than it saves in fees.
How Futura Tickets fits into this picture
Futura Tickets is built for promoters who want the economics *and* the control — the things the fee tables above leave out:
- Your data, not ours. Full organiser analytics on every sale, buyer and channel, so the audience you build belongs to you.
- Encrypted QR tickets that resist duplication and screenshot fraud at the door.
- Official, controlled resale, so sold-out events recapture secondary demand on your terms — increasingly relevant given the direction of UK resale regulation.
- Box office and access control for the day itself, from door lists to real-time scan counts.
- Flexible settlements, because payout timing should fit your production calendar, not the other way round.
- Cashless payments for bars and on-site spend, closing the loop between the ticket and everything sold inside the venue.
We would rather you compare us the same way this article compares everyone else: ask for the total cost per ticket at your prices, the payout schedule in writing, and who owns the buyer data. Those three answers tell you more than any headline percentage.
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*All third-party fees quoted were checked in August 2026 against the sources linked and may have changed — always confirm against each platform's official pricing page. This article is general information, not legal or tax advice; consult a qualified professional for your specific circumstances.*
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