The Hidden Tax on Every Ticket You Sell
When Sarah launched her quarterly design workshop series in Manchester last year, she was thrilled to sell out all 200 tickets at £75 each. What she didn't anticipate was watching £1,500 of her £15,000 revenue disappear into the ticketing platform's coffers, a brutal 10% haircut that turned her modest profit into barely breaking even.
Sarah's story isn't unique. Across the UK, thousands of event organisers are unknowingly subsidising bloated ticketing platforms that have grown fat on double-digit percentage fees. While organisers pour their hearts into creating memorable experiences, traditional ticketing companies quietly siphon away 8-10% of every ticket sale, delay payouts for weeks, and lock organisers into ecosystems that own their most valuable asset: their audience data.
This isn't just a minor inconvenience, it's a systematic wealth transfer from the people who create value to the platforms that extract it. The time has come for a fundamentally different approach.
Why We Built Presso Tickets
For years, Presso has been the engine behind Progressive Event Apps, powering ticketing for some of the most innovative events across Europe. Our robust ticketing infrastructure has processed millions in ticket sales, delivering the reliability and security that event organisers demand without the punishing fees they've come to accept as inevitable.
But as we watched our clients consistently frustrated by the traditional ticketing landscape, we realised something: the same technology that powers our comprehensive event platform could exist as a standalone solution. Why should organisers who simply want to sell tickets be forced into expensive, feature-heavy platforms when what they really need is dead simple: secure payments, fast payouts, and fair pricing?
Our philosophy is straightforward: event organisers should own their audience, control their revenue streams, and choose where and how they sell tickets. No platform should hold your business hostage with extraction-level fees or proprietary data silos.
What Presso Tickets Does (and What It Deliberately Doesn't Do)
Presso Tickets strips away everything you don't need and perfects what you do:
What it does:
- Generates clean, shareable payment links in minutes
- Lets you sell anywhere - embed in your website, share on social media, include in email newsletters, or print QR codes for physical marketing
- Processes payments through Stripe's bulletproof infrastructure (the same system trusted by millions of businesses worldwide)
- Delivers payouts on a predictable 7-day cycle, not when the platform feels like it
- Charges a transparent 1% fee per ticket—no hidden costs, no surprises, no games
What it deliberately doesn't do:
- Extract double-digit percentages from your hard-earned revenue
- Force you into a proprietary marketplace where you compete with everyone else for attention
- Hold your customer data hostage or use it to build competing events
- Require you to learn complex software or commit to long-term contracts
- Make you dependent on their marketing ecosystem to reach your own audience
This isn't about building another ticketing platform, it's about building the anti-platform. A tool so simple and fair that it gets out of your way completely.
The Numbers That Actually Matter
Let's cut through the marketing speak and look at what this means for your bottom line.
Consider a mid-sized conference selling 500 tickets at £50 each:
Traditional Platform Scenario:
- Gross revenue: £25,000
- Platform fees (10%): £2,500
- Net revenue: £22,500
- You lose: £2,500
Presso Tickets Scenario:
- Gross revenue: £25,000
- Presso fee (1%): £250
- Stripe processing (≈1.5%): £375
- Net revenue: £24,375
- You keep an extra: £1,875
Scale this up to a 2,000-person festival at £100 per ticket, and you're looking at £7,500 extra revenue that stays in your pocket instead of padding a platform's margins. For many organisers, that difference represents the viability of their event entirely.
The mathematics are undeniable: every percentage point matters when you're building a sustainable event business.
Who This Is For
Presso Tickets is built for the event organisers who've been underserved by an industry obsessed with flashy features over fundamental fairness:
Independent Event Organisers who run everything from intimate workshops to large conferences and refuse to accept that giving away 10% of revenue is "just the cost of doing business."
Venues taking control of their own programming instead of relying on external promoters, who need a simple way to sell tickets without the overhead of traditional platforms.
Conference and Workshop Leaders who have built audiences through years of valuable content and want to maintain that direct relationship rather than surrendering it to a middleman.
Community Groups and Charities where every pound matters and platform fees directly reduce the impact they can have on the causes they serve.
Festival Organisers who understand that margins are everything in live events and that preserving an extra 7-9% of revenue can mean the difference between profit and loss.
If you're tired of subsidising ticketing platforms with your margins and want to keep more of what you earn, Presso Tickets is for you.
How It Works: Simplicity by Design
Getting started takes minutes, not hours:
- Visit pressotickets.com and create your event
- Add your ticket types with prices, quantities, and any basic details
- Get your unique payment link instantly
- Share everywhere that matters to your audience - social media, email newsletters, your website, printed materials, QR codes at previous events
- Watch secure payments flow directly into your Stripe account
- Receive automatic payouts every 7 days like clockwork
No technical integration required. No learning curve. No commitment beyond the tickets you actually sell.
The entire process is designed around a simple principle: you shouldn't need to become a software expert to sell tickets efficiently.
Why It's Fundamentally Different
The traditional ticketing model is broken by design. Platforms profit most when they extract maximum fees while providing minimum value, creating an incentive structure that works against organisers' interests. Presso Tickets flips this dynamic entirely.
Margin Preservation: Keep upwards of 97.5% of your revenue instead of watching 10% disappear into platform profits. This isn't a small difference, it's the margin that determines whether your event is profitable.
Radical Simplicity: No complex dashboards, no feature bloat, no training required. Just clean payment links that work everywhere you want to sell tickets.
True Ownership: Your audience data belongs to you, not us. Your customer relationships remain yours to nurture. Your independence stays intact.
Speed Without Friction: Payouts arrive in 7 days, not whenever the platform decides you can have your money. Setup takes minutes, not days of back-and-forth with account managers.
Transparent Pricing: One percent. No hidden fees, no surprise deductions, no complex pricing tiers designed to confuse you into paying more.
This isn't incrementally better, it's a completely different philosophy about how ticketing should work.
A Personal Note: Why the 10% Model Is Broken
Here's something the big platforms don't want you to think about: their business model requires your events to be less profitable so theirs can be more profitable. They've convinced an entire industry that surrendering 10% of revenue is reasonable when the actual cost of processing payments is closer to 2%.
The remaining 8% isn't going toward revolutionary features or exceptional service, it's pure extraction. It's profit built on organisers who don't realise they have alternatives.
We built Presso Tickets because we believe event organisers deserve better. You're the ones taking the risk, creating the value, and building the audiences. The tools you use should amplify your success, not tax it.
The Path Forward
Event ticketing is ripe for change. For too long, organisers have accepted extraction-level fees as an unavoidable cost of business. But just as Stripe revolutionised online payments and Shopify transformed e-commerce by putting merchants first, the ticketing industry needs platforms that align their success with organisers' success.
Presso Tickets is our contribution to that future. It's not about building the biggest platform or capturing the most market share, it's about proving that fair pricing and simple tools can coexist profitably.
Ready to Keep More of What You Earn?
The next time you plan an event, ask yourself: do you want to give away 10% of your revenue to subsidise a platform's margins, or would you rather keep that money to invest back into better experiences for your audience?
Try Presso Tickets today at pressotickets.com
For larger events or custom demonstrations, contact our team directly. We're looking for early adopters who want to be part of reshaping how events sell tickets, organisers who understand that keeping more of their revenue isn't just better business, it's better for everyone.
The future of event ticketing starts with a simple question: why give away money you don't have to?
Presso Tickets: Fair pricing. Simple tools. Your audience. Your revenue.