Eventcraft vs Eventbrite pricing: $1,995 vs $39 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

Eventbrite charges 2.7% plus $0.79 per ticket, on every ticket, forever. Sell 500 tickets at $20 and that's roughly $665 in fees for one event. Eventcraft is $39 once — after your first event it's already the cheapest ticketing stack you'll ever run, and it never touches the funds or takes a cut.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Eventbrite actually costs over one, two and three years, what Eventcraft gives you for $39 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Eventbrite actually costs you

At 2.7% + $0.79/ticket, one Eventbrite subscription adds up to $665 every year — $1,995 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Eventcraft is $39 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $1,956 — and every year after that adds another $665 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Eventcraft vs Eventbrite, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $39, once

Self-hosted ticketing with tiers, QR tickets, webcam door check-in and auto-promoting waitlists; money runs through your own Stripe link. The highlights:

• 📄 Event pages — Title, rich description, date and time, venue or virtual link, cover image and a shareable clean URL.
• 🎫 Ticket tiers — Free or paid, quantity limits and early-bird pricing windows, with all money handled as integer cents to avoid rounding bugs.
• 💳 BYO Stripe Payment Link — Paste your own Payment Link per tier; attendees pay Stripe's standard rate and only Stripe's rate, with zero API calls to any payment provider.
• 📱 QR-code tickets — Generated server-side, emailed on confirmation via optional SMTP, and always viewable at a private ticket URL.

One 500-ticket event on Eventbrite costs around $665 in fees; Eventcraft is $39, and the next event is free.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One payment of $39 gets you the packaged Windows installer, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/event-registration-mvp and run it yourself for free.
2. Deploy or run desktop. docker compose up onto a $5 VPS to go public, or npm run desktop for an Electron window auto-logged-in as admin.
3. Paste your Stripe link and sell. Add a Payment Link per tier and attendees pay Stripe directly — Eventcraft never touches the money.

When paying Eventbrite is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Eventbrite's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying 2.7% + $0.79/ticket for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Eventcraft is $39, once. For the deeper dive, read the Eventcraft vs Eventbrite head-to-head.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Eventcraft is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/event-registration-mvp. The $39 buys the packaged installer and 1-click setup; building from source is free.

Where does my attendee data live?
In one SQLite file on your own server or machine. Zero telemetry, and Eventcraft makes zero API calls to any payment provider.

Do you take a per-ticket cut?
No. Attendees pay your own Stripe Payment Link at Stripe's standard rate; Eventcraft takes nothing. It's $39 once, no renewal.

More on Eventbrite pricing

Eventcraft — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns