A host told me this last week, standing in her kitchen after everyone had left. I thought she was joking. She pulled out her phone and showed me the math. Thirty tickets at ₹800 each. ₹24,000 gross. Sounds solid for a weeknight workshop, right?
Then she walked me through the cuts.
She’d run Instagram ads for the event — ₹1,500 to boost the post, another ₹1,000 on a story ad. Her link-in-bio tool has a monthly subscription. The ticketing platform took 5% commission. GST at 18% on that commission. Payment gateway took another 2.5%. And her settlement was held for two weeks, so she’d already fronted the venue rental and materials out of pocket.
By the time the money actually reached her, she’d kept about ₹18,000 out of ₹24,000. The venue was ₹8,000. Clay and materials were ₹5,000. She’d made ₹5,000 for a month of planning, promoting, and hosting an evening that thirty people loved.
“The irony,” she said, “is that most of those people already followed me. They were going to come anyway. I basically paid Instagram to remind my own audience that I exist.”
That line hasn’t left my head.
Because she’s right. Think about how her tickets actually got sold. She posted a reel. People who already follow her tapped through to her profile, hit the link in bio, landed on a ticketing page, and booked. The entire journey happened because of her content, her community, her following.
The ticketing platform entered at the very last step. Processed a payment. That’s it. And for that, it took a percentage and held her money.
She built the audience. The platform collected the rent.
I asked her if she’d thought about charging more. She said she had, but ₹800 already felt like the ceiling for a weeknight workshop in Bangalore. Go higher and you lose the college crowd and the people who are just curious enough to try something new. Go lower and you can’t cover costs. She’s stuck in a margin that doesn’t have room for four middlemen.
And Priya isn’t alone. I’ve had this exact conversation with maybe fifteen hosts in the last two months. Different events, different price points, same story. Sold out, barely broke even, wondering how everyone else seems to be making it work.
Here’s the thing — most of them aren’t making it work either. They’re just not talking about it.
This is why we built Offlyn the way we did. We don’t take a commission from hosts. Zero. Not on tickets, not on revenue, not ever.
I know that sounds like a pitch. Maybe it is, a little. But it’s also what I kept thinking about while stacking those chairs. Priya made something thirty people loved. She did every part of it — the planning, the creating, the promoting, the hosting. And at the end of the night she was on her phone doing math trying to figure out why it didn’t add up.
The experience economy in India is about to take off. The people building it shouldn’t be the ones losing money.
If this math felt familiar — reply to this email. I want to hear about it.
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