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Chobble Tickets vs Fatsoma

Fatsoma is popular with student events and nightlife promoters. Here's how a small, open source alternative compares on pricing, features, and data ownership.

Pricing comparison

Fatsoma charges 10% per ticket with a minimum of £1, plus Stripe payment processing fees (1.5% + 20p in the UK). So on a £15 ticket, that's £1.50 to Fatsoma plus roughly 43p to Stripe — £1.93 gone per ticket before you see a penny.

Chobble Tickets is a flat £50/year (£25 for charities and community groups) with no per-ticket fees at all. You only pay Stripe or Square processing fees on top. If you sell more than about 50 tickets at £15 each in a year, Chobble Tickets is already cheaper.

On higher-priced tickets the gap grows quickly. A £30 ticket costs you £3.00 in Fatsoma platform fees alone — that's 60 tickets to break even against a full year of Chobble Tickets.

Interactive cost calculator

Drag the sliders to see how costs compare at different volumes:

Total takings £2,000.00
Chobble Tickets Fatsoma
Annual fee £50.00 £0.00
Platform fees £0.00 £0.00
Payment processing £0.00 £0.00
Total cost per year £0.00 £0.00
Cost per ticket £0.00 £0.00

Fatsoma fees: 10% per ticket (minimum £1), plus Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p). Chobble Tickets: £50/year flat + Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p). Source: ticketing.fatsoma.com/pricing (March 2026).

Data ownership and privacy

Fatsoma markets to your attendees and uses your event data to promote other events on their platform. Your attendees become Fatsoma's audience, not just yours.

With Chobble Tickets, attendee data is encrypted with hybrid RSA/AES encryption and stays under your control. There's no platform trying to cross-promote other events to your audience, and no marketing emails sent to your attendees.

Payouts

Fatsoma pays out after your event ends — typically 2 or more days after. You're essentially lending Fatsoma your ticket revenue until they decide to release it.

Chobble Tickets uses Stripe or Square directly, so payments go straight to your account with standard processing times. You're always in control of your own payment processor account.

Feature comparison

Both sites share some features:

  • Online ticket sales with Stripe payment processing
  • Apple Pay and Google Pay at checkout (via Stripe)
  • QR code scanning for check-in at the door
  • Email confirmations to attendees after booking
  • Capacity management to prevent overselling
  • Free event support with no payment setup required
  • Refund processing
  • Custom questions at checkout

Fatsoma has some features Chobble Tickets doesn't, and vice versa:

Fatsoma has features Chobble Tickets doesn't:

  • Rep/affiliate network — a built-in system where promoters sell tickets on your behalf and earn configurable commission per ticket type, with rep-only tickets and tracking dashboards showing which reps are driving the most sales. Reps are paid out directly through Fatsoma. See Fatsoma Reps
  • Consumer mobile app — the Fatsoma App is a consumer-facing app where attendees browse and discover events. Fatsoma report that 70% of their ticket sales come through the app
  • Follower system — every ticket buyer automatically becomes a follower you can market to for free with future event announcements
  • Push notifications — event announcements hit followers' phones via push notification and email
  • Cross-sell — upsell your other events on the order confirmation screen after each purchase
  • Ad pixel tracking — built-in retargeting and lookalike audience support for Facebook and other ad platforms
  • Structured customer profiles — structured data capture (age, gender, social handles, phone, location) with profile saving across events (Chobble supports multiple-choice custom questions per event)
  • Promo codes — discount codes, presale codes, and hidden ticket access codes
  • Event discovery platform — Fatsoma's website and app function as a marketplace where attendees browse and discover events, particularly strong in student and nightlife markets
  • Fatsoma Chat — social sharing features within the consumer app
  • Custom branded apps — on the Professional tier (~£1,500), Fatsoma builds custom branded iOS/Android apps and websites for your events
  • Fast 3-tap checkout — streamlined checkout with saved card details via the Fatsoma app

Chobble Tickets has features Fatsoma doesn't:

  • End-to-end encryption — attendee data is encrypted at rest with hybrid RSA-OAEP + AES-256-GCM
  • Apple & Google Wallet tickets — attendees can add tickets to their phone wallet
  • ICS calendar feeds — subscribers get automatic calendar updates
  • RSS feeds — syndicate your events to feed readers
  • Pay-what-you-want pricing — let attendees choose their price
  • Daily/recurring event support — built for events that repeat on a schedule with per-date capacity
  • Custom domain support — use your own domain name
  • Self-hosting option — run the platform on your own servers for free
  • Open source — inspect, modify, and contribute to the code under AGPLv3
  • Custom questions — add multiple-choice questions to events and collect structured answers at checkout, with answers visible across the admin interface, CSV exports, and webhooks
  • Public & admin API — RESTful JSON API for building custom integrations, plus authenticated admin API
  • Webhooks — outbound POST on every registration
  • Event groups with tiered ticketing — organise related events into collections for multi-event bookings with a single checkout, and create ticket tiers sharing a venue capacity cap
  • Custom email providers — use Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, or Mailgun so emails come from your domain, not the platform's
  • Customisable email templates — full control over confirmation emails with Liquid syntax for a fully white-label experience
  • Embeddable widget — drop an iframe into your existing website
  • No marketing emails to attendees — your audience stays yours

When Fatsoma might be better

  • You're running student events or university nightlife and want access to Fatsoma's promoter network
  • You need a rep/affiliate system to incentivise ticket sellers
  • You want your events listed on a discovery platform aimed at students
  • You have very low volume (under ~50 tickets/year) and prefer paying per ticket over an annual fee

When Chobble Tickets might be better

  • You want predictable, flat-rate pricing with no per-ticket fees
  • Privacy and encryption matter to you
  • You don't want a platform marketing to your attendees
  • You're a community group, charity, or school (£25/year)
  • You want Apple/Google Wallet integration, calendar feeds, or RSS
  • You value open source and the ability to self-host
  • You're selling enough tickets that 10% per ticket adds up quickly

Who owns Fatsoma?

Fatsoma was founded in 2005 in Manchester (originally as YourNightOut Limited, renamed in 2006). It is a private limited company (Companies House #05495880) owned by its two remaining co-founders, Paul Stacey and Chris Pearson. A third co-founder, Ben Taylor, stepped back from a controlling role in 2019. The company has around 35 employees and raised modest funding from AXM Venture Capital and via a Seedrs crowdfunding campaign, but remains independently owned with no corporate parent.

Chobble Tickets is run by one person as a Community Interest Company (CIC) — a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit. All of Chobble's code is public under AGPLv3, and the platform can be self-hosted by anyone without depending on Chobble as a company.

Pricing sources

The pricing information on this page was verified in March 2026. Fees may change — check the links below for the latest figures.