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 first build an event, and it stays available afterward on the event manage page, so you're not locked out of adjusting it once the event is live:
- 1Enable Custom Fees on the step
- 2Give the fee a title — this is the wording buyers see on their receipt, so make it explain itself
- 3Choose Flat or Percentage
- 4Enter the amount — in your event's currency for a flat fee, or as a percentage of the ticket subtotal for a percentage fee
- 5Add the fee, and repeat if you have more than one
- 6Publish — the fees are stored against the event and applied automatically at checkout
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. Gross revenue on an event is the ticket subtotal plus the custom fee. 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, orders, and refunds
Custom fees show as their own line at checkout, so a buyer sees a venue fee described as a venue fee, not as a mysterious increase in the ticket price. 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. On the order detail page in your dashboard, you can see the fees that were charged on that specific order, so if a buyer asks what a charge was for, you have the record.
If you refund an order, the custom fee comes back with it. It's part of the refundable amount, alongside the ticket price, rather than being retained. That matters if you're weighing how much of a fee to charge: a refund returns it in full along with the rest of what the buyer paid.