Release waves that do not collide: pricing a club night in tiers

What is a release wave, mechanically?

It is a ticket tier with three things attached: a price, a window in which it can be bought, and an inventory pool of its own. That last one is what makes a wave a wave rather than a countdown. Early release is not the same tickets at a lower price until you change your mind; it is two hundred tickets that exist separately from the four hundred behind them.

The consequence a promoter cares about: the price someone paid stays readable on their order after the wave has passed. Nothing rewrites it. When a guest emails in November asking what they paid in August, the order says so.

How should I structure the waves for one night?

Three rungs is the shape that works for most rooms, and the reason to have a third is not revenue — it is that the last rung tells you whether the night is actually selling or whether you sold your friends a cheap ticket in week one.

• Early release — a real cap, small enough to sell out in days. Its job is proof, not profit.
• Second release — the bulk of the room, the price you actually planned around.
• Final release — priced at or near the door price, so nobody who waits is rewarded for it.
• On the door — the same event, sold at the till on a card, for whoever turns up.

What happens when a wave sells out mid-transaction?

The rung closes and the next one takes over. A hold against a closed rung is refused server-side rather than filtered out of the page, which matters at the exact moment it always happens: fifty people in the same basket at the same second on a Tuesday lunchtime. The page filter is cosmetic and the price check is the gate.

The room itself cannot oversell. Capacity is enforced in the database rather than in the application, so concurrent buyers produce exactly the number of sales there were places for and everyone else gets a clean refusal. Baskets that lapse without paying return their places to the pool on a sweep, so an abandoned checkout does not quietly hold a place all afternoon.

What does a night actually cost in fees?

The platform fee is 2.5% + $0.99 per paid ticket and nothing else — no monthly fee, no setup fee, no contract. On a $15.00 ticket that is $1.37. Across 300 tickets, a $4,500.00 night pays $411.00 and leaves $4,089.00.

Card processing is charged by the payment provider on top, at their rate, and is not marked up. When you compare against another platform, compare platform fee plus processing — a headline rate that excludes processing is not a number you can plan a door with. A free event costs nothing at all.

You choose who carries the fee: absorb it, add it to the guest as a booking fee, or split it. The amount does not change with the choice, only which side of the sale it comes out of.

What can I not do with waves here?

There is no waitlist. When the last rung is gone the night goes off sale and stays there — this vertical does not declare the waitlist capability, so the off-sale page has no join form on purpose rather than by omission. And there is no season pass or membership across a residency: both are optional for club promoters and are not turned on, so a run of dates is a run of dates.