Fees & payment terms for hosts

Offkai charges one fee: a small flat amount per paid Stripe ticket. There's no subscription, no setup fee, and no charge for free tickets or for tickets paid outside Stripe. This article is the exhaustive reference for what that fee is, how it's collected, and what it means for your payout.

No monthly or setup fees

Creating an account, publishing events, running Arigathanks Boards at the free tier, and accepting cash or manual payment methods (Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, Wise, etc.) all cost nothing. There's no subscription and no annual fee. You only pay Offkai when you sell a paid ticket through Stripe.

The Offkai platform fee

Every paid Stripe ticket carries a flat platform fee of roughly $0.35 USD equivalent, billed in the event's own currency so the number doesn't drift with exchange rates:

Free tickets never carry this fee — there's nothing to charge a fee on. Tickets paid by cash, Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, Wise, or any other method you set up outside Stripe also carry no Offkai fee, because that money never touches Offkai; the attendee pays you directly.

Stripe's processing fee is separate

On top of Offkai's platform fee, Stripe charges its own processing fee on every card transaction. This is Stripe's fee, not Offkai's — Offkai doesn't set it, doesn't collect it, and has no control over Stripe's pricing. Rates vary by the country your Stripe account is registered in:

These are current rates as of the last time this article was checked against Stripe's published pricing — Stripe can change them independently of Offkai, so treat stripe.com/pricing as the source of truth if you need an exact number.

Registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits may qualify for Stripe's discounted nonprofit processing rate. You apply for that directly with Stripe — Offkai isn't part of the approval and doesn't need to be looped in. If Stripe approves you, the discounted rate applies automatically to your account's future charges.

International or currency-converted cards typically cost more to process than a card issued in the same country as your Stripe account. Stripe's base rate above doesn't fully capture that variance — see the processing-fee buffer below if you want to smooth it out.

How the money actually moves

Offkai never touches attendee money. Card payments go through Stripe Connect: the attendee's charge lands directly in your connected Stripe account, and both fees come out of that same transaction before the rest settles to you —

• Offkai's platform fee is deducted automatically as a Stripe application fee, at the moment of the charge.
• Stripe's processing fee is deducted by Stripe itself, as part of processing the charge.

Neither fee ever passes through an Offkai bank account. The flow is host ↔ Stripe ↔ attendee, with Offkai's cut taken out in-transit by Stripe on Offkai's behalf. See Payments & payouts for the full legal shape of this (you're the merchant of record on every card charge, which also determines who Stripe sends chargebacks to).

Absorb fees or pass them through

Per event, when you accept Card (Stripe) as a payment method, you choose one of two fee models:

• Pass-through (default) — the fees ride on top of your ticket price. At checkout the attendee sees an itemized breakdown: ticket price, service fee, and estimated card processing fee, added together into the total they pay. Your payout is the full ticket price you set.
• Absorb fees — your ticket price is the flat total the attendee pays, no add-ons shown. Both fees are subtracted from your payout instead, so what lands in your Stripe account is your ticket price minus the platform fee and Stripe's processing fee.

Neither model changes how much Offkai or Stripe charges — it only changes who's shown paying it, the attendee at checkout or you at payout.

Processing-fee buffer

When you're not absorbing fees, you can also add a buffer on top of Stripe's base processing rate: none, +1%, or +2%. This exists because Stripe's base rate (the table above) is calculated off a domestic card — a card issued outside your Stripe account's country, or one that requires currency conversion, actually costs more to process than that rate reflects. Without a buffer, those higher-cost cards quietly eat into your payout even in pass-through mode, because the attendee was only charged the estimated (lower) rate. A buffer pads the estimate so your per-ticket payout stays consistent regardless of which card an attendee happens to use.

Refunds and non-refundable fees

Offkai's platform fee and Stripe's processing fee are both non-refundable once a ticket has sold, except where required by law. This holds even if:

• you or the attendee later cancel and refund the ticket,
• the whole event gets cancelled, or
• a chargeback comes in.

This matches how Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, StubHub, and most other ticketing platforms handle their own fees. The reasoning: the platform fee covers the service Offkai already rendered at the point of sale (listing, checkout, ticketing, support infrastructure), and Stripe's processing fee is charged by Stripe the instant the payment is processed — neither service gets "un-rendered" by a later refund. If you refund an attendee in full, you're refunding the ticket price from your own payout; the fees already taken don't come back to you. See Cancelling and refunding attendees for how to issue refunds and what a partial refund looks like against these fees.

Taxes are on you

Every fee described in this article is exclusive of applicable taxes. Offkai does not calculate, collect, or remit sales tax, VAT, GST, or any other tax on your ticket sales. Determining whether your jurisdiction requires you to collect tax on event tickets, and actually collecting and remitting it, is entirely your responsibility as the host. If you're not sure whether that applies to you, talk to an accountant familiar with your local rules — this isn't something Offkai's fee structure or Stripe account settings handle for you.

Fee changes

Offkai reserves the right to change the platform fee structure, with 30 days' written notice before any change takes effect. A fee change is never retroactive — it only affects tickets sold after the new fee's effective date. Anything already sold keeps the fee that applied at the time.

What attendees see on their bank statement

Card payments go through Stripe Connect Direct Charges, which makes you — not Offkai — the merchant of record. That means the base of the statement descriptor attendees see on their card or bank statement is your Stripe account's own descriptor, not Offkai's name.

Offkai appends a fixed suffix to every charge so the attendee can still tell it came through Offkai:

<YOUR ACCOUNT DESCRIPTOR>* Offkai App

For example, if your Stripe statement descriptor is "JOHN DOE EVENTS," an attendee's statement shows something like JOHN DOE EVENTS* OFFKAI APP — card networks typically render the whole thing in uppercase regardless of how it's cased here.

Your account descriptor comes from Stripe, not from Offkai — set it in your Stripe dashboard → Settings → Public details → Statement descriptor. If you'd rather attendees see your event brand than your legal or business name, change it there. Changes only apply to new charges going forward; anything already settled keeps the descriptor it was charged under. The * Offkai App suffix itself isn't configurable per host — it's a fixed platform default so every Offkai charge is recognizable the same way, regardless of who the host is.

Related

• Payments & payouts (legal terms)
• Fees & your local currency — the same fees from an attendee's point of view.
• Cancelling and refunding attendees