What is Festival Software?

At almost any scale, festivals run on a tight budget. Your ability to obtain funds will make or break your event. The best festival software platforms don’t just help you manage your event, they give you more access to cash.

Instant payouts

Ticket sales for festivals start months — sometimes even years — in advance. It only seems natural that festival organizers will want to use those funds to pay for the myriad costs of their festival.

However, it is common practice for most festival ticketing platforms to hold your ticket sale money until after the festival is over — sometimes days or even weeks. This sort of financial gridlock can create an immense amount of stress for festival organizers.

When someone buys a ticket to your event through SimpleTix, their money is instantly sent to your account for your use. That means you can actually pay for festival expenses as they arise leading up to the event.

SimpleTix’s instant payouts give you your profits as you accrue them.

While you will most likely still need capital to get your festival up and running, having ticketing profits as they become available help with the financial demands that festivals bring.

SimpleTix gives the power over to festival organizers, allowing them to have profits as soon as they become available.

Lower fees

All ticketing platforms charge a fee to use their services, usually a flat rate per ticket plus a percentage of the total price. Depending on ticket price, amount of tickets sold, and frequency of your event, you can lose a lot of your festival’s profit simply to ticketing fees.

SimpleTix charges fewer fees than other festival software platforms, and less than half the cost of Eventbrite.

SimpleTix charges a rate of $0.79 per ticket plus 2% of the ticket’s total price. To compare, Eventbrite charges $1.59 per ticket and 3.5% of the ticket’s total price.

With SimpleTix, there is no upfront cost — you can sign up to use it and start creating your festival on teh same day. You will not be charged anything until you sell a ticket. There are no ongoing subscription fees.

In addition to lower fees, SimpleTix has a $9.99 fee cap. This means any ticket over $200 will always only cost $9.99 in fees for you.

With Eventbrite, you’ll pay 3.5% of your ticket price, no matter how mch your tickets cost. For a $500 ticket, Eventbrite will keep $19.09.

Festival software should also offer options to best fit your event.

If you plan to sell tickets only on-site, SImpleTix offers a pricing plan of $0.25 per ticket.

For large venues with frequent events, we offer a premium plan for $49 per month that reduces ticket feees to $0.49 per ticket with a 1.5% fee per ticket sold.

Remember the old days where you could only pay with cash, check, or card? With advances in digital banking and fintech tools, there are more ways to pay than ever before.

Your average ticket purchaser probably has a few ways to pay, and they expect you to meet them where they’re at, in that regard. After all, they are trying to give you their money.

• Digital payments grew by 40% from 2019 to 2021.
• In that same period, digital wallet use increased by 36%. Over 80% of Gen Z and Millennials have used digital wallets in the past year.

Many festival ticketing platforms have their own internal payment processing system, which is why it takes them longer to pay out your funds. It can also be difficult to integrate their system to work with your on-site ticketing tools.

The best festival software solutions are flexible and versatile. They allow you to accept payment in any form it comes.

How will you take payments on-site the day of your festival? If you have a digital payment system like Square or Stripe, be sure to choose festival ticketing software that functions seamlessly with your system.

If you plan to rely on cash payments on-site, you might reconsider. Cash is a lot to handle. It takes time for attendees to count it out and for your staff to make changes, increasing wait times at the gate.

With a payment system like Square, you can take on-site purchases in a blink. Square takes Apple Pay and Android Pay, chip cards, and contactless payments.

SimpleTix is one of the only festival ticketing platforms with an official Square partnership, and it’s definitely the most flexible. SimpleTix also integrates with Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and over a dozen other payment gateways.

The fewer barriers for guests to buy their tickets, the better! All of your hard work festival planning is for naught if your guests are frustrated trying to buy, download, and use their tickets. SimpletTix makes buying and using a ticket as seamless as possible for your festival goers.

Many festival ticketing platforms use your event to promote their software, taking advantage of you and your attendees.

Take Eventbrite, for example. Like many festival software platforms, Eventbrite lets you create a website for your event where you can give location and contact information in addition to selling tickets.

But an Eventbrite page comes cluttered with Eventbrite logos, links, and promotions. They even advertise other events right there on your own page.

In addition, some festival ticketing platforms use your attendee data and contact information to send them promotions and advertisements unrelated to your event. Some also reserve the right to sell your attendee information to whoever they want.

Your festival software should put your event first.

At SimpleTix, we believe that organizing your event is not about us —it’s about you. This means your SimpleTix hosted ticket site or widget will be absent of our branding and will never feature outside advertising. Because it is your festival — not ours.

With SimpleTix, you have full control over the branding on your ticketing page — from logo, color, and photography. It will never be littered with SimpleTix logos.

SimpleTix also gives you full ownership of your attendees data. this means you can contact your attendees for future events they may be interested in, but we won’t.