Ticketing software for event organisers in India
An independent organiser in India is asking two questions: how much of the ticket do I keep, and does the door work. Thrivia is India's booking and ticketing platform for tour operators, trek leaders, and retreat & fest hosts to sell tickets, take bookings, and manage guests. On money, an event runs either a hosted gateway checkout carrying a 4.9% handling fee, which the event sets as payable by the attendee or absorbed by the organiser, or manual UPI, where the attendee pays the organiser's own VPA and the organiser verifies the screenshot. An event can offer both and let the buyer choose. On the door, QR check-in runs from any number of phones at once, each keeping its own queue when a gate has no signal, and replay is idempotent, so a duplicate scan resolves to one check-in.
Where the money actually lands
This is the first question independent organisers ask and the one most platforms answer indirectly, because on almost all of them the answer is the same: the buyer pays the platform, the platform keeps a cut, and what is left reaches you on the platform's schedule. Townscript settles on a choice of daily, weekly or after the event, and new organisers are generally weekly. KonfHub settles automatically to your bank every Thursday. Neither is slow or unfair. It is not your money in your account at the moment the ticket sells.
Thrivia runs two channels and they differ on exactly this point.
| Channel | Where the money goes | What Thrivia charges |
|---|---|---|
| Manual UPI | The attendee pays your own UPI ID directly, so the money reaches your bank without passing through Thrivia or a gateway. | No handling fee, because there is no gateway transaction to pass one through. |
| Hosted checkout | The attendee pays through a payment gateway checkout Thrivia hosts, covering UPI, cards and netbanking. The gateway rate is not a fixed list price: bring the MDR you are paying today and Thrivia will match it. The gateway settles that money to your own account on its standard T+2 cycle. There is no withdrawal screen, because the money is never Thrivia's to release. The one exception is a booking where the attendee opted into the 1% Thrivia Guarantee at checkout: that booking's revenue shows as Held in your Finance view until the attendee checks in. It is an accounting line, not custody of the money. | 4.9% handling fee, already inclusive of its own GST, charged on the GST-inclusive subtotal. It covers the gateway's own charge plus a small platform margin. The event decides whether the attendee pays it on top or the organiser absorbs it. |
Manual UPI carries no handling fee and the money arrives directly, and in exchange somebody on your side opens each uploaded payment screenshot and accepts or rejects it. Hosted checkout settles without anyone verifying anything, and carries the 4.9%. A single event can offer both and let the buyer choose at checkout. A single-channel event ignores any such choice, so a manual-only event cannot be pushed into a fee-bearing gateway order and a gateway-only event cannot skip the fee.
Collecting UPI payments for events covers the manual channel in detail, including what to do when a screenshot is a forgery.
What BookMyShow costs, and why nobody can tell you
Every comparison of Indian ticketing quotes a BookMyShow commission, usually somewhere between 5% and 25%, and a convenience fee of 10% to 15% on top. Checked on 18 September 2026, BookMyShow's self-serve organiser product publishes no commission, no percentage and no fee figure anywhere on it. The circulating numbers are not traceable to a page BookMyShow publishes.
A comparison table that puts a precise BookMyShow percentage beside a precise competitor percentage is quoting one figure that is published and one that is not, so the two are not comparable. An unpublished rate usually means a rate negotiated per event, which is normal for a marketplace whose value is its audience rather than its software. If you want that audience, you pay whatever they quote you, and it may well be a good trade. If you are bringing your own audience from Instagram, you are paying a marketplace rate for distribution you already have.
The door: several gates, one guest list
A college fest has four entrances, two of them with a queue of three hundred people, and volunteers who were briefed for ninety seconds.
- Any number of phones scan the same event at once. There is no single scanner device and no per-gate licence. Each volunteer opens the Thrivia mobile app on their own phone and scans.
- Each phone keeps its own queue when the network drops. A gate behind a concrete wall at an auditorium, or a ground with no coverage, does not stop the line. Scans are written to the device and replayed when signal returns.
- A duplicate scan checks somebody in once. Replay is idempotent, so the same QR scanned at gate two after gate one, or scanned twice because a volunteer was not sure it registered, resolves to one check-in rather than a double entry or an error the volunteer has to interpret.
- A multi-ticket booking checks in per ticket. Somebody who bought four passes and arrives with two friends first checks in two, and the booking shows two of four.
- Manual check-in by name is there for the phone that will not scan. A cracked screen at 7pm is not a reason to turn someone away.
One limit stated plainly: load the guest list on each phone while it still has signal. The app can replay scans it took offline, but it cannot fetch a roster it has never seen, so a volunteer handed a phone at a dead gate with the app opened for the first time has nothing to scan against.
College fests, and the things that make them different
A fest is fifteen events, and the committee running it turns over completely every year. Three things follow.
Sell each competition, workshop and night as its own dated event with its own capacity, rather than one page with fifteen ticket types, because the capacity that matters is per room. Put free entries through the same system as paid ones, so the door is one guest list rather than a scanner for payers and a clipboard for everybody else, which is how fests end up not knowing their own footfall. And use ticket tiers for the in-college and outside rates instead of a discount code you tell people, because a code told to one person is a code known to a hostel.
On money, manual UPI suits a fest better than most events. The buyers are students who pay by UPI anyway, the committee usually has a dedicated account, and 4.9% of a fest's gate is a real number that nobody budgeted for.
The Google Form, the QR poster and the printed list
The setup most independent organisers run is a Google Form for registrations, a UPI QR in the poster and the bio, a Sheet of who paid, and a printed list at the door with two volunteers and a pen. It costs nothing, it goes up in twenty minutes, and for a hundred-person gig it is the correct tool. It gives way at the door and at the moment two things are being sold at once.
| How it works today | Where it breaks | What Thrivia does instead |
|---|---|---|
| A UPI QR in the poster, payments landing in your account. | The money is yours immediately, which is the good part, but nothing joins a payment to a person. Forty screenshots arrive on WhatsApp, three are for ₹300 from the same name, and one is an old screenshot resent. | Manual UPI keeps the money going straight to your own account and attaches each uploaded screenshot to a named booking in a verify queue. |
| A Google Form collects names and the Sheet is the guest list. | The form does not know who paid and the payments do not know who filled the form, so somebody reconciles two lists by name on the morning of the event, and every misspelling is a decision. | The booking is the record. Payment state, the buyer's answers and the ticket all sit on one row. |
| Two volunteers work a printed list at the door. | Four hundred people at two gates, and the two lists cannot see each other. Somebody who entered at gate one walks around and enters at gate two, and you find out from the headcount, not the list. | Every phone scans against the same guest list, and a duplicate scan resolves to one check-in. |
| The venue has no signal at the side entrance. | The scanner app, if you have one at all, refuses and the volunteer falls back to waving people through. Your attendance number for that gate is now a guess. | The mobile app queues scans on the device and replays them when signal returns, so the side gate is still counted. |
| You post the event where people already are, and some of the audience is theirs rather than yours. | A marketplace listing puts you in front of people who were browsing rather than looking for you, and that is a real source of sales for an unknown promoter. | This is the row Thrivia does not fix. There is no discovery traffic and no marketplace audience: every visitor to your event page is one you sent there yourself. |
| Sales close when you remember to take the form down. | You sell twelve tickets past capacity on the day because the form has no seat count, and refunding twelve excited people is the first hour of your event day. | Capacity is held per event and the ticket type closes itself when its count is gone. |
The work in moving is mostly deciding your ticket types and their counts, which sounds trivial and is the conversation where a committee discovers it has been selling three different student rates. Budget an evening. Keep the Sheet for costing.
What it costs
Thrivia is a monthly subscription with an included booking allowance, not a commission per booking. Plans start at ₹2,999 a month plus 18% GST at the entry rung and rise with bookings and admin seats, with better effective rates on six-month and annual terms. The live catalogue is on pricing, and that page is the one to trust.
Compare it properly rather than on the headline. Checked on 19 September 2026 with the India and INR selection, Townscript's pricing page prices a ₹1,000 ticket end to end: the buyer pays ₹1,023.60 and the organiser receives ₹946.80. That is a 2% Townscript fee and a 2% gateway fee, each ₹23.60 with GST, a ₹23.60 platform fee charged to the buyer, and ₹5 TCS and ₹1 TDS deducted from the payout. KonfHub publishes 2% plus GST on Lite and 3.75% plus GST on Silver. On 400 tickets at ₹300, which is ₹1.2 lakh of gate, a rate in that region is a few thousand rupees for one event. On a subscription with manual UPI you pay the monthly fee and no handling fee on the gate. The subscription loses when you run one event a year and wins by the second or third, which is why it suits a society, a collective or a promoter with a calendar rather than somebody organising a wedding reception.
When Thrivia is the wrong choice
- You are buying an audience, not software. A marketplace has discovery traffic. Thrivia has none: every visitor to your event page is one you sent. If you cannot fill the room yourself, a marketplace commission is buying you something real.
- You need reserved seating with a seat map. Tickets here are counted, not placed.
- You need to price and settle in foreign currency. Every order is created in rupees, whatever card pays it.
- You need registration desk hardware or turnstile integration. Check-in is phones.
- You depend on Zapier, a public API, or a calendar sync. None of those exist.
If you sell dated trips rather than nights out, booking software for tour operators and booking software for trek organisers cover the same machinery with the pieces those businesses actually use.
Common questions
Which ticketing platforms in India let the money go straight to my own bank account?
Very few, because most platforms collect the payment themselves and settle to you on a schedule. Checked on 18 September 2026, Townscript pays out to your own bank on a choice of daily, weekly or after the event, and KonfHub settles automatically every Thursday, but in both cases the buyer pays the platform first. Thrivia's manual UPI channel is different: the attendee pays your own UPI ID directly, so the money reaches your account without passing through Thrivia, and you verify the uploaded payment screenshot against the booking. The hosted gateway checkout carries a 4.9% handling fee, which the event sets as payable by the attendee or absorbed by the organiser, and the gateway settles to your own account on its standard T+2 cycle. On the manual channel Thrivia holds nothing, because the money never arrives. On the gateway channel Thrivia does not hold it either, and the one thing that shows differently is a booking where the attendee opted into the 1% Thrivia Guarantee, which reads as Held in Finance until check-in. There is no withdrawal screen on either, because there is nothing of yours sitting with us to withdraw.
Can I run QR entry across several gates at the same event?
Yes. Any number of phones can scan the same event at once through the Thrivia mobile app, with no per-gate licence and no dedicated scanner hardware. All of them check against the same guest list, and a duplicate scan resolves to a single check-in, so somebody scanned at gate one and again at gate two is checked in once rather than counted twice.
What happens at a gate with no mobile network?
Each phone keeps its own queue. When there is no usable connection the scan is written to storage on the device instead of being refused, the queue keeps moving, and the pending scans are replayed to the server automatically once signal returns. Open the guest list on each phone while it still has signal, because the app can replay scans it took offline but cannot fetch a roster it has never loaded. The offline queue is in the mobile app only; the web dashboard needs a live connection.
How much does BookMyShow charge an organiser?
They do not publish it. Checked on 18 September 2026, BookMyShow's own self-serve organiser product states no commission, no percentage and no convenience fee figure anywhere on it. The numbers quoted around the internet, commonly 5% to 25% plus a 10% to 15% convenience fee, are not traceable to a page BookMyShow publishes. Treat a comparison table quoting a precise BookMyShow rate with caution, and assume the rate is negotiated per event.
What platform can I use to sell tickets for a college fest in India?
Sell each competition, workshop and night as its own dated event with its own capacity rather than one page with fifteen ticket types, because the capacity that matters is per room. Put free entries through the same system as paid ones so the door is one guest list instead of a scanner for payers and a clipboard for everyone else. Use separate ticket tiers for in-college and outside rates rather than a discount code, since a code told to one person is a code known to a hostel. Manual UPI usually suits a fest, because the buyers pay by UPI anyway and a percentage of the gate is money no committee budgeted for.
What is the cheapest way to sell event tickets online in India?
On a per-event basis, a payment link or UPI QR plus a form costs nothing and is genuinely the cheapest option for one small event. Across a calendar of events the comparison changes, because the real cost is the reconciliation and the door rather than the fee. Against the published percentage rates, which on 19 September 2026 were 2% plus GST on KonfHub Lite and, on Townscript, 2% to the organiser and 2% to the gateway with a further 2% charged to the buyer, a flat monthly subscription with payments going to your own UPI is cheaper from about the second or third event of any size, and more expensive if you run one event a year.
Can one event accept both UPI and card payments?
Yes. An event can offer both channels and let the buyer choose at checkout. A single-channel event ignores any such choice, so a manual-only event can never be pushed into a fee-bearing gateway order and a gateway-only event can never skip the fee.
Sources
- Townscript pricing, India and INR selection, fee block and worked example checked 2026-09-19
- Townscript, organiser charges and payout schedule checked 2026-09-18
- KonfHub pricing, including weekly automated settlements checked 2026-09-18
- BookMyShow self-serve organiser product, which publishes no fee figure checked 2026-09-18