If you only trade five months, you should only pay for five months
Every venue has its own one percent and its own cap, so a site that is shut is barely charged at all until it opens again.
Five months of trading, five months of billing
The fee sits at the cap while the season runs and falls to almost nothing while the doors are shut. It follows what the venue took, not what a contract said you would take.
Snow season. A summer strip. A festival run. The shape is the same wherever the quiet months happen to fall.
What a closed season actually costs here
A venue turning over fifty thousand a month across a five month season hits the cap in each trading month and sits near nothing for the rest of the year.
A fixed monthly fee bills through the closed season as well, on a contract, because that platform needs the money arriving whether you are open or not.
Both of the usual models break on a closed season
The percentage platforms earn nothing while you are shut and make it back by taking more once you open, which gets worse the better your season goes. The fixed fee platforms simply charge you through the months you are closed.
One percent with a cap is the only shape that is cheap when you are quiet and predictable when you are busy. It only works if the charge follows the venue rather than the account, and that had to be built in from the start rather than offered later as a discount.
Anything that does not trade evenly across the year
- Weather dependent venues
- Outdoor attractions and water parks, where a wet month is a quiet month.
- School holiday businesses
- Entertainment centres and indoor play, where a handful of weeks carry the year.
- Festival and event operators
- Trading in bursts, with long gaps a fixed subscription treats as ordinary months.
- Sites being fitted out, or just opened
- A venue not trading yet costs nothing, and very little while it finds its feet.
A closed venue is still a business
Nothing goes dormant when the site does. Your bookings, your customers and your reporting stay there through the quiet months, which is when most people actually do their planning.
Vouchers sold at the end of one season still work at the start of the next, at any venue you run. What is owing on them sits on a ledger your accountant can read rather than in a spreadsheet somebody keeps updating.