Skip to main content
Goal: You sell one kind of entry, General Admission, but want the price to rise as demand grows. Early buyers get a deal, and the last tickets cost the most.

​
The example

Total capacity: 500 tickets. Potential revenue if everything sells at face value: 100 x $20 + 300 x $30 + 100 x $40 = $15,000.

​
Should you use a release chain?

You want the next price to open the moment the previous tier is gone, without watching sales and flipping tickets on by hand, including overnight or on weekends.
You can also combine them: give each tier a sale window as a safety net, and let the chain advance early if a tier sells out first.

​
Set it up

1

Check the three tickets

Open Ticket Management and find the session. Confirm that Early Bird, General Admission, and Final Release each have the right Price, Total, and sale dates. Name and price lock after the first sale, so check them now.
2

Set the starting statuses

Make Early Bird Active. Keep General Admission and Final Release Inactive so buyers only see the tier that is currently open.
3

Give every tier a future end time

Every ticket in a chain needs a sales end time that has not passed. Set the end times so they make sense in order, with each later tier ending no earlier than the one before it. The portal tells you if they do not line up.
4

Create the chain

Open the Release Chains panel above the ticket table and select New chain. Name it, for example “GA”, and select Create. New chains start paused.
5

Add the tiers in order

Use + Add existing ticket to add Early Bird, then General Admission, then Final Release. Drag to reorder if needed. The order is the order they open.
6

Turn on Auto-release

Switch Auto-release on. Each tier now shows a line such as On sale or “Activates automatically when ‘Early Bird’ sells out”.

​
What happens as tickets sell

1

Early Bird is on sale

Buyers see only Early Bird at $20. The chain card shows how much of it has sold.
2

Early Bird nearly sells out

The next tier opens when the percentage shown at the top of the Release Chains panel is reached (for example “The next tier opens when 98% of the current tier is sold”). General Admission becomes Active at $30 automatically, and you will see “Auto-activated when ‘Early Bird’ sold out” next to it in the ticket table.
3

Repeat for Final Release

The same happens when General Admission nears sell-out: Final Release opens at $40.
4

The chain finishes

After the last tier, the chain is marked Exhausted.
The next tier opens at a high percentage sold, not necessarily at the very last ticket. Unpaid orders still in checkout can hold a few tickets for a short while. If they are released, the earlier tier can show a few tickets back on sale, for example “Sold out - next tier opened - 3 back on sale”.

​
What attendees see

Attendees only see tickets that are Active and within their sale window. At any moment they typically see one General Admission option with the current price. They never see the later tiers until their turn. There is no countdown or tier list on the buyer page unless you describe it yourself in the ticket Description or event page.
Mention the staging in the Description of each ticket (up to 200 characters), for example “Early Bird: first 100 tickets only”. Buyers then understand why the price may rise.

​
Keep an eye on it

  • Select the history icon (Activity log) in the Release Chains panel to see each sell-out and automatic activation, and when auto-release was turned on or paused.
  • Switch Auto-release off at any time to pause the chain. Tickets keep their current status, and later tiers will not activate until you turn it back on.
  • If a later tier is activated manually while an earlier one is still selling, the portal tells you the inactive tier will not auto-activate. Activate it manually or remove it from the chain.

​
Reuse it for other sessions

If you run several sessions with the same tiers, use Copy to… on the chain card. The portal matches tiers to tickets in the other session by name and lets you review matches before copying. Copied chains start paused, so review them and then turn on Auto-release. See Multi-day festival.