Setting an Entry Fee

Free or Paid

Every event is one or the other, and it is an explicit choice rather than an empty box. A free event is free; a paid event needs an amount, and that amount cannot be zero — a paid event at $0.00 is a free event spelled twice.

What a Competitor Pays

The entry fee is not the only line. A quote is built from three parts:

• Your entry fee — the amount you set, and the amount you collect.
• A BoutHost service fee — our cut.
• The card processing cost — sized to cover what the payment processor charges you on each payment.

The competitor sees your entry fee, one Service & processing line covering the other two, and the total. They are computed separately, so a change in processing rates is never a silent cut to what you collect.

The total is solved rather than added up, because the processor charges a percentage of the total — including of its own fee. Adding the three together would under-collect on every transaction.

You Are the Merchant

You are the merchant of record for entry fees on your own event, not BoutHost. A competitor's payment goes to your account, and our share is split off the same transaction.

That is why there is a separate setup at Payments → Payouts — it opens an account for you with our payment processor, Stripe, under your own name. Completing it is what makes your event able to take money. You can set it up once you have an event that charges an entry fee: that event's manage screen takes you there, and you only ever do it once.

Being the merchant is not only about where the money lands. If a competitor asks their bank to reverse their payment — a chargeback — it is taken back out of your account, along with Stripe’s fee for handling one. BoutHost cannot contest a chargeback on your behalf. You answer it yourself, in Payments → Refunds — see payments and payouts for hosts. BoutHost's service fee is not returned on a refund or a chargeback.

Your record of every entry fee you have taken is at Payments, in your account menu, and it can be downloaded as a spreadsheet. Refunds and chargebacks are answered from there too, on the Refunds tab. That list, and the event page itself, are what you would use to answer a question about a charge later.