BEWARE BEWARE - Ticketbud organise/ provide the platform for people to sell tickets to events which may not ever take place - and you won't get your money back. The organiser of the event can be some obscure individual somewhere that you can't track. For example, a ticketed event such as the 'Donald Trump jr. Live!' sold thousands of tickets using this platform - 7 months later the 'event' has been cancelled twice and never taken place.

Changed Pricing After Sign Up & Entering Info. I was attracted to their business model and pricing system. I believed it would be a great fit for me and my event. I went through the process of setting up my event, entering in tickets, entering different variations, adding descriptions and custom questions for some of the tickets. When I had everything ready I went through the payment process and they had changed it. I requested to use the payment method I had signed up under, but they replied no after waiting for a day, even though someone emailed me during my first day of setup to see if I needed help. They pulled the rug from under me. I will never use them again. Ticketbud use to be against fees and began to put an end to greed and fees from the ticket taking industry. Now it seems as though they've become what they hated. Article from WIRED: wired.com/2012/10/ticketbud/ Why the change? ..."the primary reason behind this change is that it allows us to align our resources to better serve you, the customer." Really? So, if I sold $200 tickets the extra $101 + 2% is for my better serve me, the customer?

Not for commercial events! Beware, do not use their Email Invite program! I was so excited, so very excited, to find an affordable option for selling tickets online. In the past, my company has used Eventbrite, with wonderful results but a large price to pay. We decided to try another option - therefore Ticketbud! I published our month long Harvest Festival on Ticketbud and pasted my 1,000 email subscribers to their online Email "Invite". Sending a large number of emails manually, is of course time consuming! Ticketbud's online feature looked so professional, I put up my 100% faith. Low and behold, after the mass email went out, I received many, many, many angry replies. Ticketbud failed to send the mass email as a "Blind carbon copy", instead each recipient could see the email addresses of all the other recipients!!! I can understand the concern of these folks, whose email addresses were exposed to 1,000 other people. Needless to say, Alderbrook Park received many bad reviews from this incident. I immediately contacted Ticketbud, explained my frustration and requested a refund of $138. They explained that their program is not designed for large events. It is mostly designed for small personal events and they were sorry for my misunderstanding! Furthermore, they refused to issue a refund. Can you believe it ? They don't mention these details at all on their website. Beware, event coordinators! Their website may look great, but behind the scenes, there is little, professional customer service. Today's online standards, require that emails be kept private, unless permission is given. Ticketbud basically violated trust of 1,000 people : (

Ticketbud - Getting Better! I've used Ticketbud for my bar's concert venue space since mid-2014 and was initially attracted to their inexpensive "one-price" option as opposed to some of the other competition out there. At the time their service was alright, it wasn't anything great but I didn't expect it to be for the price that they were charging. For my ticketing and event management needs, they were fine. However, then in late 2014 they announced a pricing change where they were moving towards an entirely fee-based model. While it's a fairly big change, it wasn't one that made me angry. I've talked with their customer service reps before when I had an issue and they've always been very good about helping me. They've also been working hard to add new features so it's definitely been fine. One new thing I really enjoy is that you can add the very small service fee to the price of the ticket so it doesn't even show up as a service fee, and as an organizer I don't have to pay at all. So in effect, I'm saving money. Ticketbud still has a ways to go but I do applaud them for working hard to keep my business.

Cheap, but has significant issues We've used TicketBud for two events now in the 200-250 person range. On the upside, they're cheap. However, the downside is that they feel cheap. The last time we used them, I think we reported half a dozen bugs, most of them obvious. But they seemed like they were just getting started, so this year I figured we'd give them the benefit of the doubt and try again. On the upside, the basics do seem to work. You can put some tickets up for sale, send people off to PayPal, and get money. Last time we successfully used their android app to check people in. But the edge cases are rough. For example, we had early-bird tickets and regular tickets. When we were down to 1 early-bird ticket TicketBud would still let people try to buy up to 20 of them. Then the attempt would blow up with some sort of error. When they came back to the page, it would show that the early-bird tickets were sold out, so they felt cheated. We've got a half-dozen people upset on our Facebook page because of this. I finally had to just reduce the number of early-bird tickets by 1 so that people trying to buy in pairs would stop getting hit with this. We had a similar problem when the event was almost sold out: mysterious site failures and angry attendees. Another big problem: they don't appear to have waitlist functionality. I just had to go build something with Google Forms and stick it half-assedly in the page. Speaking of which, their supposedly WYSIWYG editor ends up with the content looking fairly different on the two pages. I had to spend a bunch of time messing with the raw HTML to get the page to come out right. And there are a number of other issues that, at least to this software developer's eye, look obvious. I thought using TicketBud was a way to save money for my guests, and I guess it did. But next time I'm going to try something else in hopes of finding something better built.