When you're setting a price for a retreat weekend, a kirtan night, or a single yoga class, you need to know two things before you publish: what the buyer will actually be charged at checkout, and what will land in your account afterward. Those two numbers are rarely the same, because two separate fees sit between the sticker price and the payout. This article walks through both fees, how they're calculated, and what happens in the situations that trip people up — free tickets, discount codes, donation add-ons, and very low ticket prices.
What fees actually show up on a ticket?
There are two fees, and they behave differently. The payment processing fee is 3.05% plus $0.40, and it's charged once per order, not once per ticket — so a single order for four tickets still only pays that $0.40 fixed portion one time. The same rate applies to every card, so there's no variation to plan around there.
The second fee is BrightStar's own platform fee, and it depends on the organizer's plan. Seva is free. Elevate carries a low per-ticket fee made up of a small flat amount plus a small percentage. Amplify carries a higher per-ticket fee, again a flat amount plus a percentage. Because this fee is per ticket rather than per order, it scales directly with how many tickets are in the cart. Every fee, on every tier, is shown to the buyer before they pay, in their local currency — and a ticket priced at $0 carries no fees of any kind.
How does the math actually work?
For a $100 ticket on Elevate, the platform fee is calculated first: a small flat amount plus a small percentage of the ticket price. The processing fee is calculated separately, on the ticket total, as 3.05% of the price plus the $0.40 order-level flat charge. Those two fees are added to the ticket price to get what the buyer pays; the organizer receives the ticket price itself.
One detail worth holding onto: the processing percentage runs on the ticket total, not on the ticket total plus the platform fee. The platform fee is deliberately kept outside that base. This is also why the processing fee is described as "grossed up" — the fixed and percentage rates are set so that the processor's own cut of collecting BrightStar's fee is already covered, rather than being an extra surprise subtracted later.
Do you pass fees to buyers, or absorb them?
BrightStar gives you three ways to handle this, and the choice changes who nets what — not whether the fees exist. Passing fees to the buyer is the default: on a $100 ticket, the buyer sees "$100 ticket + $6.19 fees = $106.19," and you receive the full $100.
Absorbing fees folds them into the sticker price instead. The buyer sees a clean "$100 total," and you receive $93.81 after both fees come out of that amount. Partial absorption splits the difference: you absorb the platform fee but still pass along the processing fee, so the buyer sees "$100 + $3.45 fees = $103.45" and you receive $97.26. Nothing here changes the fees themselves — it only changes whose total shows them.
What happens with free tickets, discounts, and donations?
A $0 ticket charges no fees at all, and payment processing is skipped entirely rather than attempting a zero-value charge — this is what makes free RSVPs and comped tickets genuinely free to run.
Discount codes are applied before fees are calculated, not after: a 20% discount on a $100 ticket brings it to $80, and both fees are then calculated on that $80, not the original $100. Donation add-ons work the opposite way in terms of scope — fees are calculated on the combined total of the ticket price and the donation together, since the donation becomes part of what's actually being charged.
Very low prices are where the flat portions of each fee start to dominate. A $5 ticket carrying $0.98 in platform fee and $0.55 in processing fee works out to roughly a 31% fee ratio — worth knowing before you price anything in that range, since the fixed dollar amounts don't shrink just because the ticket does.