The moment a community event stops being free, the plugin behind it has to do a lot more work. A free RSVP just needs a name and an email. A paid ticket needs a checkout, a way to handle tax, a coupon system for early-bird pricing, a refund policy someone actually wrote down, and a record of who paid what, for every event, indefinitely. Most community sites get this far and reach for Eventbrite, mostly out of habit, and then discover the fee line on their first sold-out event.
This guide covers adding paid ticketing to a WordPress community site with Eventonomy, the free events plugin we build at Wbcom Designs, running on BuddyX. We will walk through tiered pricing, early-bird windows, coupon codes, the checkout options available, and the refund policy questions you need to answer before you sell a single ticket, not after.
Last updated: 6 November 2026
Table of Contents
- By the numbers
- What Ticketing Fees Actually Cost
- Is Your Community Ready to Charge for Events?
- Step 1: Turn On Paid Tickets in Eventonomy
- Step 2: Build Tiered Pricing
- Step 3: Set Up Early-Bird Pricing
- Step 4: Coupons and Discount Codes
- Step 5: Tax and Checkout Setup
- Write a Refund Policy Before You Need One
- Eventonomy Pro vs. Eventbrite: What the Fee Actually Buys
- Common Mistakes
- What It Costs
- Launch Checklist
- Real-World Scenario
- Reporting Back to Your Organisation
- FAQs
- Sources
By the numbers
The global event management software market was valued at USD 16.0 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 39.6 billion by 2033, an 11.5% annual growth rate from 2026, according to Grand View Research.
What Ticketing Fees Actually Cost
Eventbrite’s publicly posted fee schedule for its standard paid-ticketing package has long run around 3.7% of the ticket price plus a flat fee of roughly $1.79 per ticket, on top of whatever payment processing already costs. On a 500-ticket, $40 conference, that is well over a thousand dollars that never reaches the organiser, taken off the top of every single sale, sold-out event or not. A community charging for tickets to fund the event itself, not to run a ticketing business, feels that fee differently than a professional event company does.
Eventonomy Pro charges a flat annual or one-time licence fee instead, with no per-ticket platform cut on top, regardless of how many tickets a single event sells. The only ongoing cost beyond the licence is standard payment processing (Stripe or PayPal’s own transaction fee, the same either way), which is unavoidable on any platform that takes a card.
Is Your Community Ready to Charge for Events?
Not every community event should be paid. Charging works well when the ticket price covers a real cost, a venue rental, catering, a speaker fee, or printed materials, and members understand exactly what it is paying for. It works poorly when it is introduced suddenly on an event that has always been free, without an explanation, because members read a sudden price tag as the community changing its relationship with them, not just covering a cost.
If you are moving an existing free recurring event to paid, announce the change at least one full cycle ahead, and say plainly what the money covers. If this is a brand-new event built around a real cost from day one, the pricing conversation is much simpler, because there was never a free version to compare it against.
Step 1: Turn On Paid Tickets in Eventonomy
Paid ticketing lives in Eventonomy Pro. Once activated, any event gets a ticketing option alongside the standard free RSVP, so a community that runs mostly free meetups with the occasional paid conference does not need to change how the free events work at all. Connect Stripe or PayPal (or route through WooCommerce checkout if your site already runs WooCommerce for other products) under the ticketing settings, and the event page replaces the plain RSVP button with a checkout flow once pricing is configured.
Decide before you configure anything whether this event needs one ticket type or several. A single flat-price ticket is simpler to set up and simpler for members to understand. Tiered pricing takes a bit more planning but almost always sells more tickets overall, because it lets people self-select into the price point that fits their budget or their level of commitment.
Step 2: Build Tiered Pricing
Create separate ticket types for each tier, a General ticket, a Supporter tier at a higher price with a small extra (priority seating, a printed program, a thank-you in the programme), and, if relevant, a Student or Member tier at a reduced price for people already paying for your community in some other way. Set a capacity per tier independently, so a Supporter tier can sell out at twenty seats while General keeps selling, which also gives you an early signal of how much your most engaged members are willing to pay.
| Tier | Typical use | Capacity strategy |
|---|---|---|
| General | Standard admission, the ticket most people buy | Largest capacity, the one you promote most |
| Supporter / Premium | Higher price with a small perk, funds the event further | Smaller capacity, creates genuine scarcity |
| Member / Student | Discounted rate for existing community members | Capped or uncapped depending on how many you want to subsidise |
| Group / Table | Multiple seats bought together at a per-seat discount | Sold as a bundle, capacity counted per seat not per order |
Name tiers by what the buyer gets, not by an internal label. “Supporter, includes reserved front-row seating” sells better than “Tier 2,” because the buyer can evaluate the price against something concrete.
Step 3: Set Up Early-Bird Pricing
Early-bird pricing rewards members who commit early, which matters for a community organiser trying to gauge turnout well before the event, not just for revenue. Set an early-bird price on each ticket tier with a cutoff date (or a cutoff tied to a ticket count, whichever your event needs more), and let the price step up automatically once the window closes rather than manually editing the price and hoping you remember on the right day.
A typical structure for a one-day community conference: early bird for the first three weeks at a meaningful discount (20-30% off standard is common), standard pricing for the following month, and a final “last chance” price for the week before the event that is close to, or at, the standard rate. Avoid a fourth, higher “door price” step unless you genuinely plan to sell tickets at the door, since advertising a price increase nobody ever pays trains members to ignore your deadlines.
Step 4: Coupons and Discount Codes
Coupon codes serve a different purpose than early-bird pricing: they target a specific group rather than everyone who buys before a date. Common uses on a community site include a speaker or volunteer comp code, a partner-organisation discount, a “bring a friend” code shared by an existing attendee, or a win-back code for members who registered for a past event but did not attend. Set each coupon with its own expiry and usage limit so a code shared publicly by accident cannot be used unlimited times.
Track which coupon drove which sales. A code that nobody used tells you something about where you promoted it; a code that drove a third of your ticket sales tells you where to put next year’s promotion budget.
Step 5: Tax and Checkout Setup
Ticketing tax rules vary heavily by country and by whether the event is in person or virtual, so this is the one step worth a quick conversation with whoever handles your organisation’s finances rather than guessing. Eventonomy’s checkout supports applying tax to ticket prices where your payment processor or WooCommerce setup requires it, and fees can be set to be absorbed into the ticket price or passed through to the buyer as a separate line item, your choice, but make it deliberately rather than leaving the default in place without checking it.
| Checkout need | In Eventonomy Pro |
|---|---|
| Accept cards directly | Stripe checkout |
| Accept PayPal | PayPal checkout |
| Route through existing store | WooCommerce checkout, if WooCommerce is already active |
| Apply tax | Configurable per event or per tax setup already on the site |
| Apply a platform fee to the buyer | None, ever, regardless of ticket volume |
| Issue coupons | Code-based, with expiry and usage limits |
A ticket price is a promise, not just a number. Whatever is written next to the price, “includes lunch,” “digital program,” “access to the recording,” has to actually show up, or the next event you charge for sells fewer tickets than this one did.
Write a Refund Policy Before You Need One
Every community that sells its first paid ticket eventually gets a refund request, usually a day or two before the event, from someone with a genuinely good reason. Deciding the policy in that moment, under pressure, with one specific person’s situation in your head, produces an inconsistent policy that upsets the next person who asks. Decide the rule before you sell the first ticket and publish it on the event page itself, not buried in a separate terms page nobody reads before buying.
A simple, defensible structure that works for most community events: full refund up to two weeks before the event, 50% refund between two weeks and 48 hours before, no refund inside 48 hours, but transfers to another person are always allowed at no charge, since a transfer costs you nothing and solves most last-minute situations without a payout. State clearly whether early-bird tickets are refundable at the early-bird price or the price in effect at the time of the refund request, because that specific question comes up more often than organisers expect.
Eventonomy Pro vs. Eventbrite: What the Fee Actually Buys
Eventbrite is a reasonable choice for a one-off public event with no existing audience to sell to. For a community that already has a site and a member base, the case weakens considerably, because the fee is paid on every ticket forever, while the audience-discovery benefit Eventbrite offers matters far less to an event selling mostly to people who already follow the community.
| Factor | Eventonomy Pro | Eventbrite |
|---|---|---|
| Per-ticket platform fee | None | Roughly 3.7% + ~$1.79 per ticket on the standard package |
| Where buyers check out | Your own site, with their existing community login | Eventbrite’s platform, a separate account |
| Attendee data ownership | Fully owned, on your database | Exported from a third-party platform |
| Tied to community profile and RSVP history | Yes, same account as everything else on the site | No, a standalone purchase record |
| Public event discovery | None built in; you promote it yourself | Some, via Eventbrite’s own listings and search |
| Best fit | A community selling to its own members and network | A one-off public event needing outside discovery |
For background on moving a whole calendar, not just ticketing, off a legacy events setup, our guide on replacing The Events Calendar with Eventonomy walks through the full migration, and our piece on running community meetups without an Eventbrite fee covers the free-event side of the same decision.
Launch Checklist Before You Sell the First Ticket
- Price the ticket against a real cost. Write down what the money covers (venue, catering, speaker fee) so the price is defensible if a member asks.
- Decide tiers before building them. Two or three tiers maximum for a first paid event; add more later once you know what sells.
- Set the early-bird cutoff and tell people about it twice. Once in the announcement, once again a few days before the window closes.
- Publish the refund policy on the event page itself. Not a separate terms page, not something you explain only when asked.
- Test the checkout yourself with a real card. Buy a ticket, confirm the receipt email arrives, and check the ticket shows up correctly in your organiser dashboard before announcing publicly.
- Confirm tax handling with whoever manages your finances. Before the first sale, not after a buyer asks for a corrected invoice.
Real-World Scenario: A Professional Association’s Annual Conference
A professional association running free monthly meetups on BuddyX decides to add a paid annual conference, its first ticketed event in the community’s three-year history. The committee prices it against a specific budget: venue rental, lunch for 150 people, and a modest honorarium for two outside speakers, landing on $89 for General admission and $149 for a Supporter tier that includes a reserved seat and a printed programme with the attendee’s name in it.
Early-bird pricing runs for the first month at $69/$119, a meaningful enough gap that most members who plan to attend buy within the first two weeks rather than waiting. A coupon code goes out to the two local businesses sponsoring the lunch, covering their staff’s tickets at no charge, tracked separately from paid sales so the committee can see sponsorship value clearly at reporting time. The refund policy, published directly on the event page, offers a full refund up to three weeks out and free transfers at any time, which resolves every last-minute change request the committee receives without a single actual refund needed.
Total ticket revenue comes to just over $11,000 across both tiers. Because Eventonomy Pro charges no per-ticket fee, the full amount, minus standard Stripe processing, goes toward the venue and speakers exactly as budgeted. The committee uses the same event structure the following year, adjusting only the price and the early-bird window, since the tier names, refund policy, and checkout setup already proved themselves.
Common Mistakes
- Charging for a long-standing free event with no notice. Announce at least one full cycle ahead and say what the money funds.
- No written refund policy before the first sale. Decide the rule in advance, not under pressure from a specific request.
- Too many pricing tiers. Three or four tiers is plenty; a long list of near-identical options slows down checkout and lowers conversion.
- Coupon codes with no expiry or usage cap. A code shared publicly by accident with no limit can undercut your entire pricing structure.
- Skipping the tax conversation. Get it right before the first sale, not after a buyer asks for an invoice you cannot produce correctly.
- Promising a perk you cannot deliver. Whatever justifies the higher tier has to show up on the day, every time.
What It Costs
| Option | Price |
|---|---|
| Eventonomy (free, RSVPs and unticketed events) | $0 |
| Eventonomy Pro, 1 site | $99/year, or $249 one-time |
| Eventonomy Pro, 5 sites | $199/year, or $499 one-time |
| Eventonomy Pro, unlimited sites | $249/year, or $629 one-time |
| Payment processing (Stripe/PayPal, unavoidable on any platform) | Standard processor rate, typically 2.9% + a small flat fee |
Reporting Back to Your Organisation
A paid event generates numbers worth tracking beyond the sale itself: tickets sold per tier, revenue net of processing fees, which coupon codes converted, and how many buyers were existing members versus new faces the paid event attracted. Eventonomy Pro’s organiser reports pull this together per event, which matters most at the two moments it is usually needed, a board or committee update shortly after the event, and pricing the next one using real numbers instead of a guess.
Keep a simple running note of what worked across events: which tier sold out first, whether the early-bird window converted as expected, and which coupon source drove the most tickets. That history becomes the actual pricing strategy for next year, built from your own data rather than copied from how another organisation prices its events.
Where to Start
Decide what the ticket price actually funds and write that down before configuring a single tier. Build two or three pricing tiers at most, set an early-bird window, and publish a refund policy on the event page itself. The checkout setup in Eventonomy Pro takes less time than the decisions around pricing and refunds, which is exactly where the real planning work belongs.
FAQs
1. Does Eventonomy charge a per-ticket fee like Eventbrite?
No. Eventonomy Pro is a flat licence fee with no per-ticket platform cut, regardless of how many tickets a single event sells. Standard payment processor fees (Stripe or PayPal) still apply, as they would on any platform.
2. Which payment processors does paid ticketing support?
Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce checkout if WooCommerce is already active on the site.
3. Can we offer a members-only discounted ticket price?
Yes, by creating a dedicated ticket tier priced lower than General admission, or by issuing a coupon code specifically for existing members.
4. How does early-bird pricing work?
Set an early-bird price and a cutoff date (or ticket-count threshold) on a ticket tier. The price steps up automatically once the window closes, with no manual price change needed on the day.
5. Can we cap how many times a coupon code is used?
Yes. Set a usage limit and an expiry date per coupon so a code shared beyond its intended audience cannot be used indefinitely.
6. Do we need to apply sales tax to tickets?
It depends on your location and the event type. Eventonomy’s checkout can apply tax where your payment setup requires it; confirm the specific rule for your jurisdiction with whoever handles your organisation’s finances.
7. Can members pay in instalments?
Standard ticketing is a single checkout charge. For payment plans, route the event through WooCommerce checkout if your processor and store setup support instalments there.
8. What happens if we need to refund a ticket?
Refunds are processed through the connected payment processor (Stripe or PayPal), following whatever refund policy you publish on the event page. Write that policy before the first sale, not after the first request.
9. Can we sell a group or table ticket covering multiple seats?
Yes, by creating a group ticket type priced per bundle, with capacity tracked per seat so it correctly reduces available spots.
10. Does the free version of Eventonomy support any paid features?
The free plugin covers unlimited free events, RSVPs, waitlists, and member-submitted events. Paid ticketing, tax handling, coupons, and checkout are part of Eventonomy Pro.
11. Can we mix free and paid events on the same site?
Yes. Paid ticketing is configured per event, so a community can run free meetups alongside a ticketed annual conference without any conflict between the two.
12. Where does the ticket revenue go?
Directly to your connected Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce account. Eventonomy does not take a cut or route funds through an intermediary account.
Sources
- Grand View Research: Event Management Software Market
- Eventbrite: organizer pricing (checked 6 November 2026)
- Wbcom Designs: Eventonomy pricing and plans (checked 6 November 2026)
Interesting Reads:
How to Run a Virtual Summit on WordPress with Eventonomy
How to Run a Hybrid (In-Person + Virtual) Event on WordPress
Event Check-In and Attendance Tracking on WordPress
Running Community Meetups on WordPress Without an Eventbrite Fee