Some costs don't belong folded into the ticket price. A venue levy, a cleaning charge, a facility fee, an optional donation to the tradition you're hosting in — these read better as their own line on a receipt than as an unexplained few dollars buried in what someone paid for a ticket. Custom fees on BrightStar let you add these costs at checkout, named in your own words, so a buyer sees exactly what they paid for and why.
Think of a retreat that borrows a yoga studio for the weekend and owes the studio a cleaning fee regardless of headcount, or a kirtan that invites a small optional donation to the lineage being sung. Those are real, separate costs, and a buyer who sees "Studio Cleaning" as its own line trusts the number more than the same amount silently added to the ticket price.
Adding a fee
The Custom Fees step sits in the event wizard when you build an event:
- 1Give the fee a title — this is the wording buyers see on their receipt, so make it explain itself
- 2Choose Flat or Percentage
- 3Enter the amount — in your event's currency for a flat fee, or as a percentage for a percentage fee
- 4Add the fee, and repeat if you have more than one
The rules the form enforces
The form itself protects you from a few easy mistakes, and each one exists for a reason:
How a custom fee sits in the total
A buyer's total is built in layers: the ticket total, then the BrightStar platform fee, then your custom fee, then payment processing. Two things about that order are worth understanding before you set an amount.
First, your custom fee sits inside the base that processing runs on. Processing is calculated at 3.05 percent plus $0.40, charged once per order, on the ticket total plus your custom fee — the BrightStar platform fee is excluded from that base. So a venue fee doesn't only add its own amount to what the buyer pays; it also nudges the processing charge up slightly, because it's now part of what processing is measured against.
Second, your custom fee counts as your revenue, not BrightStar's. So if you're deciding whether to raise the ticket price or add a fee instead, know that either way the money lands on your side of the ledger — the difference is only how the buyer sees it broken out.
On receipts and orders
The order itself stores two things: the total collected in custom fees, and an itemized list of what made up that total — which is what lets a receipt render each fee as its own line rather than one combined figure. A buyer sees a venue fee described as a venue fee, not as a mysterious increase in the ticket price.