Free tool
Enter what the event costs you, what a ticket costs, and how many people fit. No account, no email.
You need to sell
199
tickets to cover €4,800.00 of costs — that is 50% of your 400 capacity.
A sold-out room leaves you €4,888.00 after costs.
Payment processing is charged separately by the payment provider and is not included above, because the rate depends on how each buyer pays.
Divide your total fixed costs by the net revenue from one ticket. Net revenue is the ticket price minus the fees you pay per ticket. The result, rounded up, is the number of tickets you must sell before the event starts making money.
Anything you owe whether ten people come or a thousand: venue hire, artist or speaker fees, production, staff, insurance and marketing. Costs that scale with attendance, such as catering per head, are better subtracted from the ticket price instead.
They matter but they vary by how each buyer pays, so this calculator leaves them out rather than guessing. As a rule of thumb in the Netherlands, add roughly €0.29 per iDEAL payment or about 1.5% + €0.25 per European card payment.
There is no universal number, but needing more than about 70% of capacity to break even leaves very little room for weather, competition or a slow on-sale. If the calculator puts you there, the usual levers are a higher price, a cheaper room, or a tier of early tickets to de-risk the first weeks.