How to Price a Ticket People Will Pay

Ticket pricing gets treated as a matter of taste. It is not. It is arithmetic with one judgement call at the end, and doing the arithmetic first makes the judgement call much easier.

Start at the floor, not the ceiling

Your floor is the per seat cost - total costs divided by the seats you have. Using the eighty seat supper club from our costs piece, that was R471. No ticket below R471 makes money if the room fills, and the room will not fill.

So plan for the room you will actually get. Seventy percent is a realistic first-event assumption. Fifty-six seats against R37 700 of costs is R673 a seat. That is your real floor.

Then find the ceiling

The ceiling is what people in your city already pay for a comparable evening. Go and look. Search the venue, the suburb, the format. Note what similar nights charge and whether they sell out.

If your floor is above the local ceiling, you do not have a pricing problem, you have a cost problem. Go back to the budget. No amount of clever positioning fixes an evening that costs more to run than anyone will pay for.

Use tiers, and mean them

Three tiers do most of the work, and they do it for different reasons.

Early bird is not a discount, it is a cash flow instrument. It brings money in while deposits are due, and a visible run of early sales is the strongest signal to everyone still deciding. Cap it - twenty seats, or two weeks - and let it actually end. A deadline you extend is a deadline nobody believes next time.

Decide who absorbs the fees

Payment processing and platform fees come off every ticket. You either absorb them or pass them on, but decide deliberately rather than discovering it in the payout.

• Absorb them and your R695 ticket nets roughly R670. Cleaner to advertise, slightly thinner margin.
• Pass them on and the guest sees R695 plus a fee at checkout. Better margin, and a small amount of friction at the last step.

For a first event, absorbing them is usually worth it. One clear number, no surprise at checkout, and you learn what the real margin looks like before you start optimising it.

Three mistakes worth avoiding

• Pricing on what you would pay. You are not your guest, and you know what it costs to run, which makes every price feel expensive to you.
• Discounting early and often. Every discount code trains people to wait for the next one. Hold the price and add value instead - a welcome drink costs you R35 and reads as worth more.
• Forgetting comps. The photographer, the person on the door, two seats for the venue owner. That is five seats off your sellable count before you start. Decide the number now and price around it.

The judgement call

Once you have a floor and a ceiling, the arithmetic is done and a range remains. Price at the top of it if the evening is genuinely distinctive and you can show why. Price nearer the middle if you are new and the room needs filling more than the margin needs protecting.

What you should not do is price below your floor to be safe. A sold-out room that loses money is the worst outcome available, and it is the one most first-time hosts walk straight into.