Eventbrite alternative for free and invitation-only events

Eventbrite charges nothing for free tickets. On paid tickets in Germany and Austria the service fee is 5.5 % + €0.99 per ticket on the Professional package, or 5.5 % on Essentials. In the United States it is 3.7 % + $1.79 per ticket plus 2.9 % payment processing per order. Ticket buyers pay the fees by default; organisers can absorb them instead. Premium costs €59 a month in Germany, Ireland, France, Italy and Spain, and buys promotion, a badge and up to 2,000 marketing emails a day. It does not lower the ticket fee. (Source: https://www.eventbrite.com/help/en-us/articles/755615/how-much-does-it-cost-for-organizers-to-use-eventbrite/ and https://www.eventbrite.com/help/en-us/articles/193833/eventbrites-new-pricing-plans/, 3 Nov 2026.)

Mission Support charges per workspace, never per guest or per response. Free is €0 for one live event with 100 guests. Plus is €49 a month or €490 a year for five live events, 500 guests each, QR tickets, your own logo and event address, campaigns and companions. Pro is €149 a month or €1,490 a year for unlimited live events, 2,000 guests each, personal invitations with approval, ticket sales, custom domain, white label and the GDPR export. A single event pass is €199 one-off. Prices exclude VAT; the same numbers apply in USD.

Paid tickets cost 2.5 % + €0.50 per ticket on top of Stripe’s fee, on any plan that sells tickets. Free tickets and free events carry no fee at all. For a €20 ticket that is €1.00 to us and Stripe’s fee; at Eventbrite the same ticket in Germany carries €2.09 in service fees.

The honest arithmetic: if you sell thousands of tickets a year to the public and never pay a subscription, Eventbrite can still be cheaper than Pro, because every fee is passed to the buyer. If most of your events are free or closed, you pay Mission Support once and nothing per guest.

Eventbrite’s strengths all point one way: find more buyers. Search placement, ads, the consumer newsletter, the Premium badge. For a conference that sells 800 tickets to strangers, that is worth a lot.

A free lecture series, a members’ assembly, a book presentation for 120 invited people, a workshop with a fixed list: none of these need to be found. They need a clean sign-up, a guest list that stays yours, reminders that arrive from your address, and a door that checks tickets without fuss. On Eventbrite these events sit next to everyone else’s in a marketplace, carry Eventbrite’s branding, and still require a .eventbrite.com link.

Mission Support has no marketplace. Guests reach the event page through your invitation, your website or your newsletter. The page lives on your subdomain from day one and on your own domain on Pro.

Eventbrite lets you make an event private: anyone with the link, or anyone with the password. Both are fine for hiding a page. Neither tells you who exactly was invited, who has declined, or lets you hold a registration back before the ticket is issued.

Mission Support gives every guest one personal link. The guest accepts or declines on it, can add a companion if you allow it, and the organiser sees both answers on the list. With approval switched on, a registration waits for you before the ticket goes out. For walk-in events you can skip all of it and register people at the door.

Invitation, reminder and confirmation mails are edited per event and sent from your verified sender address with your signature. Campaigns to the list use the same address and carry the legal footer and unsubscribe link.

Eventbrite stores personal data in the United States and relies on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers from the EEA. That is a lawful setup, and for many organisers it is enough.

Public bodies, universities and NGOs often need a shorter answer. With Mission Support the app and the database run in Frankfurt, mails go out via Brevo in Paris, and payments run through Stripe in Dublin. You are the controller, the platform is your processor under Art. 28 GDPR. Guest pages set no cookies and run no analytics. Each contact can be exported for a GDPR request, and the retention purge removes what you no longer need.

Four rows in the table go to Eventbrite, and they are not small. Its marketplace reaches 89 million people a month; Mission Support has no audience to lend you. Eventbrite Ads and the Premium social campaigns let you buy reach without leaving the dashboard; we have nothing comparable. The Eventbrite Organizer app is a native app that scans, tracks live attendance and sells tickets at the door; our scanner is the phone browser, which needs no install but sells nothing. Eventbrite has a public REST API and an app marketplace; our API is reserved for Enterprise and most data leaves as Excel.

If any of those four is the reason you chose Eventbrite, stay. If you have been working around all four to run a closed event, the rest of this page is for you.

• No marketplace, no public event directory, no promotion products.

• No native organiser app; the browser is the scanner.

• No door sales for paid tickets; walk-ins work for free events.

• Apple and Google Wallet passes are planned, not live.

• Guest pages in English, German and French; the admin is in English.