How to Sell Tickets to a Pop-Up Dinner or Supper Club

Match the tool to how you sell. For a casual, invite-only night, a free Oxto Insider account is enough: post the dinner, keep it link-only so it stays private, and share the link directly. It is free to list, RSVPs are built in, and you only pay 3% if you charge for a seat. For a ticketed dinner where you also want deposit control, prepaid seatings, and party-size and dietary notes, Oxto Reserve handles that.

The deciding question is whether you already have a full mailing list. A pure ticketing tool only manages the guests you have; a discovery marketplace like Oxto also brings guests to you.

• Casual, invite-only, free or low-cost nights: a free Oxto Insider account, kept link-only
• Ticketed dinners plus new taste-matched guests: Oxto (free to list, 3% per ticket) or Oxto Reserve
• Prepaid seatings, deposits, and split payments at scale: Oxto Reserve

Set one price per experience, then split the night into seatings with a fixed cover count. A supper club might run a 6pm and an 8:30pm seating of 12 covers each. Tiered pricing lets you sell a standard seat and a chef’s-counter or wine-pairing upgrade from the same listing.

Cap each seating at the number you can actually cook for. Overselling a fixed-menu dinner is worse than an empty chair, because you cannot turn tables the way a restaurant does. A hard cap per seating protects the meal and your margins.

Oxto Reserve supports party sizes, tiered and per-experience pricing, add-on items, and a built-in guest CRM, so you can list a base seat and a pairing upgrade side by side and sell extras on the same booking.

Take payment before the guest arrives. Full prepayment is the strongest defense against no-shows for a fixed-menu dinner, because the seat is paid for whether or not the guest shows. A deposit is the lighter option: it holds the seat and covers part of your food cost if someone cancels late.

Oxto Reserve handles deposits, prepayment, and split payments, so you can take a hold now and the balance later on a higher-priced dinner. It can also hold a card and charge a set amount when a guest does not show or cancels inside a window you choose.

Set a clear cancellation window on the listing. State whether a deposit is refundable and by when. Guests respect a policy they agreed to at checkout, and a written cutoff gives you a clean reason to keep the deposit when someone drops out the day of.

Collect party size and dietary restrictions at checkout, not by email later. A fixed menu lives or dies on knowing your allergies and aversions before you shop. Ask for them as a required field so every ticket arrives with the information you need to plan the plates.

Party size also drives your seating math. A table of four booked as one ticket still occupies four covers, so the platform needs to count heads, not orders. Tools built for dining handle this natively; general ticketing tools often treat every ticket as one anonymous head.

Oxto Reserve carries guest taste intelligence with each booking, so a guest’s preferences travel from one dinner to the next. Over a tasting series, that means you learn the room instead of starting cold every time. Repeat guests are the backbone of a supper club, and remembering them is how you build regulars.

Fill seats from three pools: your own list, your guests’ friends, and strangers who would love the dinner but have never heard of you. Most hosts work the first two well and neglect the third, which is exactly where a discovery marketplace helps.

Eventbrite lists events to a general consumer audience, with per-ticket fees that guests see added on top of your price.

Oxto takes a different angle. It is a discovery marketplace that surfaces your dinner to new guests matched by taste and setting, and it lists independent hosts and experiences that other platforms do not cover. For a new supper club without a mailing list, matched discovery beats shouting into a general feed.

The market splits into two pricing philosophies. Subscription tools charge a flat monthly fee with low or no per-ticket cut, which favors high-volume hosts. Commission tools charge little or nothing monthly and take a percentage per ticket, which favors occasional or low-volume nights.

• Oxto: hosts join and list free, so a casual or invite-only night costs nothing to run and RSVPs are built in. Paid tickets are 3%, or move to Oxto Reserve at $29 per month or $299 per year, with no per-ticket fee on the annual plan. Reserve adds prepay, deposits, split payments, party sizes, and taste intelligence, and every plan surfaces your dinner to new taste-matched guests. Payouts go to your own bank.
• Tock/Resy (Tock moved onto Resy in August 2026): flat monthly subscription (Essential at $289 per month adds 3% on prepayments; Premium at $459 per month lowers that to 2%). Built for restaurant-style prepaid dining, with a venue-scale entry cost and no free tier.
• Eventbrite: no monthly fee; per-ticket fees reported around 3.7% plus $1.79, on top of payment processing, usually passed to the attendee. General-admission audience, no dining-specific tooling.
• Partiful: free core invites and RSVP, with variable ticketing fees added in 2026. Mobile-first and social, with no reservation, deposit, or discovery tooling.
• Posh: no monthly fee; take rate reported around 10% plus $0.99 per ticket, shown all-in to the buyer. Built for social and nightlife events, a brand mismatch for a refined dinner.

Watch who absorbs the fee. Several tools add fees on top of the ticket price, which raises what the guest sees rather than lowering your payout. Decide whether you want the cleaner posted price of a subscription or the lower commitment of a per-ticket cut.

For an independent host, Oxto is free to list and charges 3% per paid ticket, or 1.5% on the $29 a month plan and 0% on the $299 a year plan. Luma is free with a 5% fee, or 0% at $708 a year. Posh sets its fee at checkout and does not publish a fixed rate; third-party 2026 reports put it near 10% plus $0.99 a ticket. Eventbrite charges 3.7% plus $1.79 a ticket. Tock/Resy (Tock moved onto Resy, American Express’s restaurant-first app, in August 2026) and CellarPass start at $229 to $289 a month plus 2% to 3%, with no free reservation tier. Card processing is extra on all of them; on Oxto it is charged by Stripe at its standard rate, currently 2.9% plus 30 cents per paid ticket.

On $5,000 in ticket sales (100 tickets at $50), here is what each platform keeps in platform fees before card processing:

What each platform actually charges, plainly:

• Oxto: free to join and list. 3% Oxto fee per paid ticket sold, or Oxto Reserve at $29 a month (1.5% per ticket) or $299 a year (no per-ticket Oxto fee). Stripe card processing, currently 2.9% plus 30 cents, applies to paid tickets. Free events are free. Takes seated reservations and ticketed events, keeps a taste profile on every guest, and lists you next to wineries in taste-matched discovery with the Oxto AI assistant and AI search.
• Luma: free plan with a 5% platform fee on paid tickets and free events free. Luma Plus removes the fee for $59 a month billed annually ($708 a year). Events only, no seated reservations.
• Posh: free to publish, no monthly fee. Posh does not publish a fixed rate; its fee is set at checkout and shown all-in, and third-party 2026 reports put it near 10% plus $0.99 a ticket with card processing included in that figure. Built for nightlife and music. Events only.
• Eventbrite: free events free. Paid tickets carry 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket and 2.9% payment processing per order, passed to the buyer by default. The largest general event marketplace. Events only.
• Tock/Resy and CellarPass: venue reservation platforms with no free reservation tier. Tock Essential is $289 a month plus 3% on prepayments. CellarPass Professional is $229 a month plus 2%, and CellarPass Enterprise is $799 a month with no reservation fee. Neither lists independent hosts.

Included and Not offered reflect each company’s public pricing and feature pages as of September 2026 and our reading of them. Company names are trademarks of their owners. Capabilities change; if you spot an error, tell us and we will fix it.

Payouts run through the platform’s payment processor to your bank, usually on a schedule tied to the event date. On Oxto, payouts go to the host’s own bank account through Stripe, and a free or invite-only night never involves a payout at all.

Read the payout timing before you commit to a menu. If a platform pays after the event, you are floating your ingredient cost until then. A deposit taken upfront eases that, since part of the money lands before you shop.

Keep your pricing math honest. Subtract processing and platform fees from the ticket price to find your true take per seat, then check it against your food, labor, and space cost. A sold-out dinner that loses money on fees is a lesson you only want to learn once.