Why I built
Enventro.

Card processing has a real cost. Stripe charges a fee to move money safely. That's fair — somebody has to do that work. But the platform fee on top — the cut Eventbrite and the rest skim before your money even hits your account — that one I could never make peace with.

A 200-seat show at $40 a ticket loses something like $640 to platform fees alone on the big incumbents. That's a sound engineer. That's the deposit on the next venue. For a non-profit raising money for a cause, it's a real slice of the cause itself.

So Enventro doesn't take any of it. You pay Stripe their processing fee — same as you would anywhere — and you keep 100 percent of the rest. There's no per-ticket cut, no “service fee” layered on top, no upsell tier that quietly turns the meter back on.

I'd rather build something that pays for itself a different way than skim from people doing good work.

Once organizers were running events on Enventro, the next conversation was always the same: “where am I doing this?” And the venues those same organizers were renting from were quietly losing 10, 15, sometimes 20 percent of every booking to a marketplace that put them next to fifty competitors and called it a feature.

So Enventro grew up. Now it does venue bookings too — with the same rule: no per-booking cut, no commission, no marketplace tax. A flat $19/month and you keep the booking.

Bookable spaces, instant booking or request-and-approve, deposits, Stripe or Square at checkout, card-on-file for incidentals, and supplier dispatch so the caterer, AV crew, and cleaners get the right information at the right time. It's the booking software a small venue would build for itself if they had a year of engineering time to spare.

The events product and the venue product share the same spine on purpose. An organizer running a fundraiser and the hall they're renting it from should not need three platforms and a spreadsheet to talk to each other.

I'm not trying to build a unicorn. I'm trying to build the most boring, dependable, fair-priced version of two specific tools — ticketing and venue bookings — and then sand them down until they get out of your way.

That means the roadmap is shaped by the people using it. Marketing tools that pull their weight. Better reporting for non-profits. Tighter check-in. More payment rails in more countries so a community group in Kingston or Lagos or Port-of-Spain has the same tools a Toronto promoter does.

If something on the platform is in your way, tell me — support@enventro.com goes straight to me. Real organizers and venue operators have shaped most of what's already here. That's not going to change.

— Sam