Fees & pricing

Event Command charges one platform fee per transaction. Stripe's card processing is folded inside it - you never see a stacked "platform fee + Stripe fee." Everything else is free: the CRM, forms, invoicing, messaging, festivals, website, team accounts, payouts. There is no subscription. Once you've connected Stripe, money settles straight to your own account and you're the merchant of record - you hold the funds and you own refunds and chargebacks. Two cases work differently, and the Terms spell them out: before you finish connecting Stripe, and on a shared "co-lab" night that's pooled between organizers on purpose, the payment lands on our account until it's paid out.

One published rate, the same for every organization, set once so nobody has to relearn it:

• Tickets, passes, merch - 7.5% + $0.50 online, 6% + $0.15 in person. In person is cheaper because a tapped card genuinely costs less to run, and we pass that on.
• Drink & food tickets - 6% + $0.15 on every lane, never less than 50¢, phone included. These are the one thing that sells two ways at the same moment - tapped at your booth and scanned off a poster by someone still in the queue - so both ways take the in-person rate, and the lane that shortens your line is never the expensive one. The tickets are the sale; exchanging one for a beer is free.
• Invoices - 5% + $1.25 (vendor booths, sponsorships, anything you bill for). Lower than the ticket rate on purpose: a ticket sale uses everything we build to fill your room, while an invoice moves money you already won.
• Bank transfer (ACH) - 1%, at least $2, never more than $50. Its own rail, priced like the pipe it is: a $5,000 sponsor pays $50 by bank instead of $251.25 by card, and stops reaching for the checkbook. Offered first on every invoice of $200 or more.
• Anything $3.00 or under - a flat 50¢. A percentage plus a fixed part looks absurd on a $2 item, so it doesn't apply there.
• Nothing over $400. A $10,000 sponsorship pays $400, not $501.25. (The one exception: the fee never drops below what the card costs to run plus 1%. That only matters past about $10,000 on a card, where it costs more than $400 just to run - pay by bank and stay capped at $50 - and on a drink ticket between $6 and $8 bought from a phone, by a cent or two.)
• Free, always - $0: cash, comps, and donations to verified nonprofits.

Who funds the fee is your choice, per product: pass it to the buyer (default - you net the full price), split it 75/50/25, or absorb it. A $100 ticket has an $8.00 fee - pass mode charges the buyer $108.00 and you net $100; absorb charges $100 and you net $92.00.

Donations carry $0 platform fee - for verified nonprofits (your nonprofit status + an EIN on file, the same gate that unlocks tax receipts). Stripe still charges its own processing on a donation; what we waive is our fee. You choose per campaign what donors are asked to add toward that processing: a flat 3% (the default - you cover the 30¢), the full card cost so you net 100% of every gift, or nothing at all; the box is checked by default and the donor can always untick it. A non-nonprofit's "donation" is billed at the normal rate - a sale can't be relabeled as a gift to skip the fee.

A few standing rules: sales tax passes through to the buyer and isn't part of the fee; service fees are non-refundable, the same way Stripe never returns its own - a refunded buyer gets back the total minus the fee they paid; and the fee never drops below what processing actually costs, so no charge ever loses money for you or for us.