How to Sell Tickets Online for Your College Fest — Free for Free Events

If your fest is free, selling tickets should cost you nothing — and on a platform that charges no fee for free events, it does. If you are charging, the question is not whether there is a fee but how big it is and who pays it. This is the practical walkthrough for both, start to finish.

First: are you actually free?

"Free" has a specific meaning that matters here. An event is free if attendees pay nothing. If you charge even ₹50, you are a paid event and money has to move through a payment gateway, which has a cost no platform can waive — the gateway charges it, not the platform.

So there are really two situations:

• Genuinely free event. On Vihaya this carries no platform fee at all. You get registration, QR tickets, check-in and certificates without paying anything.
• Paid event. There is a platform fee (banded, 1.75–4.5% depending on expected event size) plus the standard gateway charge. You can absorb it or pass it to the attendee.

Step 1 — Create the event and get the structure right

If your fest has multiple workshops or competitions, create it as a parent event with each one as its own track rather than a single event with a dropdown. Tracks give each workshop its own capacity, its own price and its own check-in, which is what you need on the day. This is the decision that is painful to change later.

Step 2 — Set capacity honestly

Capacity should be the seats in the room minus your organisers. The platform will enforce whatever you type, so a wrong number becomes a real problem — people who paid and cannot be seated.

Step 3 — Build a short form

Name, email, phone, college, year. That is the defensible minimum for a campus event. Every extra field costs completions.

Two things worth getting right:

• Validate the email. The ticket email is your only channel to that attendee. A typo like gmail.con means they paid and received nothing, and you find out from a bounce log days later.
• If it is a team event, collect every member's details. Otherwise three of a four-person team arrive with no ticket.

Step 4 — Decide who pays the fee (paid events only)

Approach	What the attendee sees	What you receive
Absorb the fee	The round price you advertised	Slightly less than the ticket price
Pass it on	Ticket price plus a service fee at checkout	Exactly the price you set

Most student committees pass it on, because their budget is built from a round per-head number and absorbing the fee quietly breaks that arithmetic. Whichever you choose, decide before you advertise a price.

Step 5 — Publish and share the right link

Share the specific track's page, not the fest homepage. Every extra click between the poster and the form loses people. Put a QR code on department noticeboards that points straight at the track.

Step 6 — Run the door properly

Assign one person to scanning and one to exceptions, so the queue never halts for a single problem. Have the roster searchable by name and phone — someone always lost the email — and print an attendance sheet as the offline fallback, because campus wifi fails at the worst moment.

Step 7 — Certificates and the handover

Publish certificates within 48 hours while people still care, and make them self-serve rather than emailing hundreds of PDFs. Then write down registrations, actual attendance, no-show rate and cost per track for next year's committee. That last one takes twenty minutes and is the most valuable thing you can leave behind.

Ready to set one up? See how college fest ticketing works, or read the full fee bands before you price anything.