Theater and cinema ticketing software in Baltimore: Maryland wants the tax in the first price, and the ADA wants the wheelchair seat in the same cart

On a Thursday in October, three people in Baltimore buy tickets on their phones. The first renews a five-play subscription at a mid-sized nonprofit theater, for the same seats this subscriber has held for six seasons. The second buys two seats for Saturday’s performance by a company with a 99-seat house in a converted church hall, one of them for a friend who uses a wheelchair. The third buys a 7:15 ticket at a single-screen cinema and wants a showing with captions, because the dialogue has become hard to hear.

Each of them is shopping in an online store, and each store is now partly written by law. If the subscription renews by itself, it is covered by Maryland’s automatic renewal statute, and if those seats are accessible seating released to the subscriber years ago, by a federal rule that tells the theater not to roll them forward automatically. The second buyer is entitled to choose a wheelchair space and up to three seats beside it online, the same way and at the same hour as anyone else, without being asked for a doctor’s note, and the first price on the screen has to be the whole price, fees and the admissions tax included, with the seat and section on every step. The third buyer’s ticket sits outside the federal fee rule, because a film is not a live event, but inside Baltimore’s ticket law and, on our reading, Maryland’s, and the cinema’s showtime page has to say which showings have captions.

Very little of that is new. The ADA ticketing rule dates from 2011, Baltimore’s ticket ordinance from 2013 and Maryland’s total-price rule from July 2024; the FTC’s fee rule, the newest, took effect in May 2025 and produced its first major settlement in April 2026. What is new is that most of a small theater’s box office now runs on software chosen for its price and configured once, and the rules live in the configuration whether anybody chose them or not.

This guide is for the people who run theater companies, presenting stages and independent cinemas in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and for anyone choosing their software. It starts with the market and what ticketing software costs, works through the arithmetic of a $30 ticket, then reads the federal, Maryland and Baltimore rules, including the admissions tax, and the ADA rules that make a seat map a legal document. It ends with what 30 Baltimore box offices and 144 theater and cinema websites across the country show their buyers and machines, how we would sell tickets online, a note for readers in Lithuania, and what we would build.

Baltimore’s stages and screens: fifteen theater companies with a payroll, fourteen cinemas and hundreds of people working for themselves

Counted by businesses with employees, Baltimore’s theater trade is small. The Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns for 2023 finds 12 theater companies and dinner theaters with a payroll in Baltimore City, employing 480 people in mid-March and paying $12.1 million a year, and three more in Baltimore County with 36 employees. The same files count five movie theaters in the City and nine in the County, 509 jobs between them, and no drive-ins. Those are establishments, not companies, and the survey leaves out everyone without a payroll, which in the performing arts is most people. The Census Bureau’s Nonemployer Statistics for 2024 count 260 performing arts businesses without employees in the City and 296 in the County, averaging $19,556 in receipts across the two. For every performing arts company with staff there are about eleven without a single paid employee.

Three things in those numbers matter for software. The first is size. Of the 26 nonprofit theaters registered with the IRS in the City and County, 16 report less than $50,000 in revenue or file only the e-Postcard for the smallest charities, and only two, Baltimore Center Stage at $8.08 million and Everyman Theatre at $6.11 million, report more than $5 million (the Lyric Foundation, at $13.75 million, and the Hippodrome Foundation are classified differently). A company with less than $50,000 a year sells fewer than 2,000 tickets at $25, usually has no box office manager and cannot justify a monthly subscription in a month with no show. That is why the free-to-the-theater platforms in the next section are so common at the low end: the theater pays nothing and the audience pays the fee.

The second is where the money comes from. The 2022 Economic Census shows that tax-exempt theater companies in the United States earned only 28.3% of their revenue from admissions and 59.9% from gifts and grants, while taxable theater companies earned 76.3% from admissions. A nonprofit theater’s box office is also its donor database, the place where a single ticket buyer becomes a subscriber and a subscriber becomes a donor, which is what the quote-only arts platforms really sell. Cinemas are the opposite: 56.7% of American movie theaters’ revenue was admissions and 38.2% was food and drink, so the concession stand is a second store that the ticketing system either knows about or does not.

The third is the trend, and it is not gentle. The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that 10.3% of American adults had seen a musical in the previous year, down from 16.5% in 2017, and 4.5% a non-musical play, down from 9.4%; 43.1% had been to the movies, down from 58.6%. Theatre Communications Group’s latest Theatre Facts, for 2023, reports subscription income 33% and single-ticket income 27% below 2019 after inflation in its trend group. Domestic box office (the US and Canada) was $8.66 billion in 2025, 23.8% below 2019, though 2026 was running about 20% ahead of 2025 as of early October, according to Box Office Mojo. Fewer people buy, and more of them decide late, one show at a time, on a phone. The box office has become the most important page a small theater has, and usually one it does not own, which is the argument for owning it.

What ticketing software costs a theater or a cinema, and what each meter counts

A small theater in Baltimore rents its box office from one of three kinds of company. The first kind charges per ticket and calls itself free, because the charge is added to what the audience pays: Ludus, BookTix, On The Stage, TicketLeap, Eventbrite and a dozen others. The second charges the theater a monthly subscription and leaves the price the audience sees to the theater: ThunderTix is the clearest example. The third sells a patron database with a box office attached, usually to larger nonprofits, and quotes its price privately: Spektrix, AudienceView, Tessitura and PatronManager. Cinemas mostly run a point-of-sale system licensed by the station or quoted by the site, sell online through that system’s own module, and many also appear on Fandango or Atom, which add their own fee to every ticket. We read the published price of every product below on October 10, 2026, from each vendor’s own page; where a pricing page refused our requests, we used the vendor’s own help center and say so.

The word that does the work on most of these pages is “free.” Ludus says it is “100% free” to a theater that passes its fee on, and shows the arithmetic plainly: on a $10 ticket the patron pays $11.25 and the theater keeps $10. That is honest, and it is also a description of who pays. At a $30 ticket the fee that reaches the buyer is $2.03 at BookTix, $2.25 at Ludus, $2.55 at TicketLeap, $2.64 at SimpleTix, $2.79 at Humanitix and $3.85 at Eventbrite, which is 12.8% of the face value. A theater that chooses one of these products is choosing what its audience will pay on top of every seat, and, since July 2024 in Maryland and May 2025 nationally, how it is allowed to show that number. We come back to that below.

The quote-only end of the market is consolidating. OvationTix now redirects to AudienceView, which sells it as AudienceView Professional. PatronManager calls itself part of the Ticketure family. ShowClix has become Leap Event Technology. Arts People is now a product of Neon One, which makes software for nonprofits. Apart from Arts People’s 99 cents a ticket, none of them publishes a price, which is normal for software that comes with a patron database, fundraising tools and an implementation project, but it means a theater cannot compare them without a sales call for each. Spektrix describes its model as a single service charge that scales with the theater’s activity, and the number arrives in a meeting rather than on a page.

One change matters to Baltimore’s smallest companies in particular. Brown Paper Tickets, the low-cost seller that community theaters have used for more than two decades, is being retired after its purchase by Events.com: no events dated in 2026 can be listed on it, and old accounts were promised access to their data until at least the end of June 2026. Events.com charges a flat fee by price band, $2.95 on a ticket between $25.01 and $35, plus Stripe’s processing, which makes it the most expensive option in the arithmetic that follows. A troupe that has been selling through Brown Paper Tickets since the 2000s is choosing a new box office this season whether it wants to or not.

Cinemas sit at the other end. Ready Theatre Systems publishes a flat annual license, $2,140 for the first selling station and $440 for each additional one, with no fee on online tickets, which is the only flat published price we found anywhere in this trade. Veezi, Agile, Admit-One and Omniterm quote by the site, and Veezi lets each cinema set its own booking fee. Fandango and Atom are different again: they charge the moviegoer a convenience fee on each ticket, the cinema cannot absorb it, and part of the price a customer sees on those sites is set by somebody other than the cinema.

Nonprofit discounts, finally, are thinner than the marketing suggests. SimpleTix takes 71¢ instead of 79¢ from a 501(c)(3), Purplepass 2.0% instead of 2.5%, Humanitix 1% instead of 2.1%, and Ticket Tailor halves its fee for charities. Eventbrite’s nonprofit discount applies to its email marketing plan, and its help center says it does not apply to ticketing fees. TicketLeap offers none. Zeffy is free to nonprofits outright, and funds itself by asking every buyer for a voluntary contribution at checkout, with wording that, according to its own help center, a nonprofit cannot change.

The arithmetic of a $30 ticket

Published prices only become comparable when you run a realistic theater through them, so we modeled two. Theater A has 120 seats and sells 6,000 tickets a year at an average of $30, in 2,400 orders. Theater B has 250 seats and sells 15,000 tickets a year at $45, in 6,000 orders. For products that leave card processing to the theater, we added Stripe’s standard 2.9% plus 30 cents per order, which is $5,940 a year for Theater A and $21,375 for Theater B; your processor may charge less. The table shows what each product would cost if the theater absorbed every fee, which is the honest way to compare them, because a fee passed to the audience is still a cost of selling the seat.

The spread is the point. Selling the same 6,000 seats costs Theater A anything from about $11,000 to about $23,600 a year on the live-theater products that publish a complete price, which is the difference between 6% and 13% of everything it takes at the box office. For Theater B the range runs from $34,125 to $80,625. Two things in the table are worth knowing before a demo. Ticket Tailor’s cheapest prices come from prepaid credits, but a reserved seat uses two credits, so a seated house pays nearly twice what a general admission show does. And ThunderTix is not really flat: at a $30 ticket its $1.25 per reserved seat plus card processing comes to almost exactly what Ludus charges, $2.25, so the real difference between them is not the cost but who sees it and where.

RTS’s flat $2,140 a year for one station costs less than Ticket Tailor’s 85 cents a ticket above about 2,500 tickets a year, which most cinemas sell in a month or two. No live-theater platform publishes a flat price at all; the ones that offer one, Spektrix, AudienceView and VBO Tickets among them, quote it privately.

Passing the fee on, and what the law now makes of it

Most small theaters do not absorb the fee; they pass it on, and the platforms are built for that. On a $30 ticket that is the $2.03 to $3.85 listed above. Under the rules in the next sections, that number is no longer an add-on at checkout. In Maryland it has to be inside the first price the buyer sees, together with the tax. A $30 seat in Baltimore with the City’s 10% admissions tax stated separately and a $2.25 fee passed on has to be listed at $35.25, or at $35.48 if the fee itself counts as part of the taxable admission charge, a question we could not find answered anywhere in writing.

The rules also change how fees should be built. A fee charged once per order cannot be honestly folded into a per-ticket price, because a single ticket carries all of it and a family of four carries a quarter each. Ticket Tailor tells its American sellers that they “may want to avoid adding a transaction fee” to stay compliant with the FTC rule. SimpleTix goes the other way, estimating the card processor’s 30-cent charge per ticket rather than per order so that the price per ticket never changes with the size of the order; its own guide notes that most processors charge it per order, so on a four-ticket order the buyer pays $1.20 for a charge the processor levies once. Either choice is defensible if the fee is labeled honestly. Each is a decision about who pays for what, and since 2024 in Maryland and 2025 nationally, it is a decision the buyer gets to see on the first screen.

Since May 2025, the first price of a play has to include every fee

The Federal Trade Commission’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 16 CFR Part 464, took effect on May 12, 2025. It covers exactly two things, “live-event tickets” and short-term lodging, and we have written about the lodging half in our hotel software guide. The ticket half is simpler to state and harder to build. Any business that offers, displays or advertises a price for a live-event ticket must show the total price clearly and conspicuously, and must show it more prominently than any other pricing information. On a website or in an app the disclosure must be “unavoidable.” The total price is the most a buyer must pay, every mandatory fee included; only government charges, shipping and optional extras may be left out of it, and those must still be disclosed, with their nature, purpose and amount, before the buyer is asked to pay.

The rule does not define a live event, but the Commission said in the final rule’s preamble that “a movie ticket is not a covered good or service,” and its staff spelled it out in the compliance guide for small businesses published in May 2025, the month the rule took effect: live-event tickets are for “concerts, sporting events, music, theater, and other live performances that audiences watch as they occur,” and “in general, pre-recorded audio and visual performances and film screenings are not live events covered by the Rule.” So the federal line runs straight through a building that hosts both. Thursday’s play is covered and Friday’s film is not. An opera relayed into a cinema while it is being sung arguably falls on the live side, since the audience watches it as it occurs, and the encore screening of the same recording a week later, on our reading, does not. The ticketing software has to know which kind of event it is selling before it can know how the price may be shown.

For a theater, four parts of the guide turn into software requirements. The first is that a fee the buyer cannot avoid is part of the price. The guide’s own example is an online ticket seller that charges a fee to buy online: that fee “cannot be avoided and must be included in the total price.” So must a credit card surcharge when there is no other viable way to pay online. A surcharge at the box office window, where cash and debit are accepted, is optional and may be shown separately, but the Commission was explicit that for an online purchase there must be “another online payment option that does not require a fee, not merely an option to go in person.” Donation and ticket-insurance boxes count as mandatory if they arrive already ticked. The second is the label. The guide tells businesses to say what a fee is for and to “avoid vague phrases like ‘convenience fees,’ ‘service fees,’ or ‘processing fees,’” which happen to be three of the most common names for a ticketing fee. A per-ticket charge that funds the building should say so; a charge that is the platform’s commission should not be dressed as a tax.

The third is the discount. If a lower price is available only to some buyers, such as members, subscribers or students, the total price advertised to everyone is the full one, and the member price can appear once the buyer has shown they qualify. A season brochure that leads with the member price in large type and the public price in small print has the prominence backward. The fourth is the house with several prices. The guide uses a theater as its example: a theater may advertise its lowest general admission total only if people can actually buy tickets at that price. “From $25” is fine while there are $25 seats left and becomes a problem on the night they sell out, which means the advertised starting price has to be computed from live inventory rather than typed into a page in August.

The rule also reaches the platforms. Intermediaries that display prices must display the total price, and must give sellers the fee information they need to calculate it; sellers must give intermediaries the information they need. A theater that sells through a platform and promotes the same show on its own website, in an email and on a listings site can be held responsible for the price in each place, and a platform that adds its fee only in the last step of checkout puts its customers in a position the rule does not allow.

The rule has teeth, and the first cases are about exactly the screens a theater builds. The FTC warned StubHub two days after the rule took effect that when a partial price is shown first, disclosing the fees later “does not cure” the problem, and in April 2026 it settled with the company: according to the complaint, StubHub had shown line items for tickets, fees and taxes on its first three pricing screens without adding them up, and the total came out 25% higher than the price first advertised. The stipulated order required $10 million in refunds of the fees buyers paid in those first days and a total price displayed more prominently than anything else. A separate case brought by the FTC and seven states against Live Nation and Ticketmaster under the FTC Act itself, not the fee rule, alleging that mandatory fees ran from 24% to 44% of the total price, survived a motion to dismiss on September 28, 2026. For knowing violations of a trade regulation rule, the civil penalty remains $53,088 per violation in 2026.

A neighboring federal law and a pending federal bill matter less to a small house than their headlines suggest. The BOTS Act, under which the FTC has sued resellers including a Maryland-based broker in federal court in Maryland, makes it illegal to get around a ticket seller’s purchase limits, but its definition of an event requires a venue that holds more than 200 people, so most of Baltimore’s black boxes are outside it. The TICKET Act, which would write all-in pricing into a statute and ban speculative tickets, passed the House 409 to 15 in April 2025 and has waited on the Senate calendar since September 2025; it would also apply only to live events in venues of more than 200 seats. For a city-owned stage there is one more date: under the Justice Department’s revised ADA Title II rule, the websites of a government the size of Baltimore City or Baltimore County, including a box office run for it by a contractor, must meet WCAG 2.1 AA from April 26, 2027, a deadline we also covered for municipal golf courses.

Maryland got there first, and Baltimore before that: the tax inside the total, the price on the ticket and the seat on every screen

Ten months before the federal rule, Maryland rewrote its own ticket statute. Chapter 456 of 2024 (Senate Bill 539), approved on May 9, 2024, and in force since July 1, 2024, amended Commercial Law §13–310.1, which until then had dealt mostly with resellers. It now also covers “ticket issuers,” and the statute lists who they are: musicians, venue operators, promoters, sports teams and leagues, “a theater company,” “a marketplace operated for consumers to make an initial purchase of tickets,” and the agents of any of them. A small playhouse in Baltimore is not caught by inference; it is named, and there is no exemption for nonprofits or small venues.

For those sellers, subsection (b) says that “the listing for a ticket and each step of a transaction to purchase a ticket” must do three things. It must clearly and conspicuously disclose the total price, “including all fees and taxes,” with only shipping that cannot yet be calculated left for later. It must “provide an itemized listing of all charges that comprise the total price of the ticket, including all fees and taxes.” And it must identify the seat number and the zone or section, “to the extent applicable to the seat and venue.” Read against the federal rule, the differences are exactly the ones software has to handle. The FTC lets a seller leave government charges out of the first total; Maryland puts the taxes in. The FTC permits an itemized breakdown; Maryland requires one, at the listing and at every step. The FTC says nothing about seats; Maryland wants the seat and section on every screen of a reserved-seat purchase. The federal rule says it does not displace a state law that protects consumers more, so a Maryland seller follows both, which in practice means Maryland’s content plus the FTC’s rules on prominence and fee labels.

The Maryland definition of a ticket is also wider. It is evidence that grants a license “to enter a place of entertainment for one or more events at a specified date and time,” with no word about the event being live. Read literally, a ticket for a 7:15 showing is a ticket under §13–310.1 even though the federal staff guidance leaves film screenings out of Part 464, so an independent cinema in Maryland that sells online is, on our reading, bound by the state disclosure rule for every showing. Subsection (e) adds a refund rule for the same sellers: when an event is canceled, a ticket turns out to be counterfeit, or it does not match its description, the seller who sold it directly must refund “the total amount paid, including the price of the ticket and any fees and taxes.” A fee that a platform’s terms call non-refundable does not stay that way for a Maryland buyer whose performance is canceled, although the statute does not say whether the theater or its platform bears that cost, and it is silent on postponements and sets no deadline. The fiscal and policy note says a violation is an unfair, abusive or deceptive trade practice under the Maryland Consumer Protection Act, with fines of up to $10,000 per violation and $25,000 for each repetition, and rates the effect on small business as “meaningful.” The legislature has since been asked to soften the rule and declined: in 2026 Senate Bill 446, which would have repealed “the requirement to include taxes in the total price,” received an unfavorable report in the Finance Committee and was withdrawn.

Baltimore wrote its own ticket law in 2013, and it counts every ticket

Inside the city limits there is a third layer, and it is the one national platforms are least likely to know about. Article 2, Subtitle 16 of the Baltimore City Code, enacted by Ordinance 13-157 in 2013, regulates the sale of tickets by any “operator,” meaning anyone who owns, operates or controls an entertainment venue in the City or promotes or produces entertainment here. Its definition of entertainment includes any “theatrical, musical, sports, dance, movie, cultural, or educational event,” and it applies “whether presented live, recorded, televised, or otherwise,” so the City, unlike the FTC, makes no distinction between the play and the film.

The ordinance is built around the box office price, the price the operator sets and prints on the ticket. Section 16-7 requires every ticket printed by or for an operator to “prominently disclose on its face the box office price,” which, on our reading, makes the ticket template itself, the PDF or the phone wallet pass, a regulated document. Where fees or a separately stated tax push the cost above that price, every point of sale, “including a website or other electronic medium,” must post an itemized list of the box office price, each tax, each fee charged by the operator and by its sales agent, and the gross ticket cost, with the taxes and fees in type at least as large as the price. The list must be shown “immediately before finalization of any sale,” read aloud “in a clear and distinct manner” when the sale is made by telephone, and given to the buyer after the sale. Section 16-6 forbids charging anything beyond the box office price, a separately stated admissions tax and fees disclosed this way, and Section 16-12 makes a violation a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500, up to 90 days in jail, or both, adding that “each ticket sold or exchanged or offered for sale or exchange” in violation is a separate offense.

One clause shows its age. The 2013 ordinance tells an operator whose printed advertisement shows only the box office price to add the words “Additional Charges May Apply” in type at least as large. Since July 2024, Maryland has required a ticket listing to show the total price, and since May 2025 the federal rule has required the total in any advertisement that shows a price for a live event. The ordinance itself says that when its rules and another law’s differ, “the condition that is the more restrictive governs.” In practice, a Baltimore theater should print the total, and keep the itemized list and the box office price on the ticket for the City.

Which tax goes inside that total depends on who is on stage and in which building

If the taxes have to be inside the first price, the ticketing system has to know the tax, and in Baltimore that is the admissions and amusement tax, which is not one number. Article 28, §19–1 of the City Code levies 10% of gross receipts from admissions, cuts it to 5% “for any theater included on the National Register of Historic Places,” and also to 5% “for any single-screen movie theater that rents or leases its motion picture film through commercial distribution.” The state takes some events out of local tax altogether. Tax-General §4–103(b)(2) forbids a county or city to tax admission to “a concert or theatrical event presented or offered by a nonprofit group” that is organized for a cultural purpose and “receives a grant directly or indirectly from the Maryland State Arts Council.” And City Code §19–4 exempts admissions charged by a registered arts and entertainment enterprise or a qualifying residing artist inside one of the City’s four arts and entertainment districts (Bromo Tower, Highlandtown, Station North and the Pennsylvania Avenue Black Arts and Entertainment District), but “only for 10 years from the date” of registration. Baltimore County charges 10% on everything but agricultural tourism, according to the Comptroller’s rate chart, subject to the same state exemptions, including the one for grant-funded nonprofit theater.

Put that table next to the ticket law and the problem is plain. The exemption that matters most to a small company follows the presenter, so a rented hall can carry no tax on Tuesday, when a grant-funded nonprofit company plays it, and 10% on Saturday, when a touring comedian does. A Maryland State Arts Council grant does not have to be large to change the ticket. The council’s fiscal 2026 operating grants to Baltimore City theater companies and venues ran from $358,429 for the Lyric Foundation to $5,587 for Black Cherry Puppet Theater, and for a group that sells $50,000 of tickets a year, a 10% tax built into its prices would be $4,545 of that money. Maryland lets the tax be either included in the price or stated separately (Tax-General §4–102(f)), but under §13–310.1 the buyer sees it either way, as a line in the itemized total.

The tax also follows tickets nobody paid for. Baltimore City applies the state’s tax on free and reduced admissions, which under Tax-General §4–105(f) is 15 cents for a complimentary ticket where other admissions cost more than $1, so comps have to be counted, not just given away. The tax is owed by whoever receives the money, returns are due by the 10th of each month, and returns for periods after December 31, 2026, must be filed electronically. A box office therefore needs a tax status on every event rather than one tax rate in its settings, a count of comps and a monthly export somebody can file. Someone also needs to recheck the status when a grant lapses, a registration passes its tenth anniversary or a nonprofit company rents its stage to a commercial show. We found no Comptroller guidance on whether a platform’s per-ticket fee is part of the taxable admission charge; that is a question to put to the Comptroller in writing.

The seat map is a legal document: accessible seats have to sell the same way as every other seat

The rule that shapes a theater’s seating chart more than any other is older than any of the three fee laws and far less discussed. Since 2011, the Justice Department’s ticketing regulation under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 28 CFR 36.302(f), has required any private business that sells tickets for an event to let people with disabilities buy accessible seating on the same footing as everyone else. That means the same hours, the same stages of sale, “including, but not limited to, pre-sales, promotions, lotteries, wait-lists, and general sales,” the same methods of distribution, the same types and numbers of outlets, which the rule spells out as the telephone, the box office and third-party ticketing services, and the same terms. A city-run venue answers to the parallel Title II rule at 28 CFR 35.138. Read with a ticketing system in mind, that first paragraph means one thing. If the public can pick seats online at midnight, a wheelchair user has to be able to pick a wheelchair space online at midnight, not call the box office on Tuesday morning.

The rest of the paragraph reads like a specification. When asked, a seller must say where every unsold accessible seat is and describe its features in enough detail for a buyer to judge it, and seating maps, brochures and price charts given to the public must show accessible seating “with the same text or visual representations as other seats.” Accessible seats must be offered at every price level and may not cost more than other seats in the same section. A buyer of a wheelchair space may buy up to three more seats in the same row next to it, if they are available, or as many as anyone else may buy if the limit is higher. A seller may not require proof of disability, “including, for example, a doctor’s note.” For a single event it may ask whether the buyer, or the person the buyer is purchasing for, has a mobility disability or needs the features of accessible seating; for a subscription or other series it may ask for a written attestation. Ticket holders may transfer accessible tickets on the same terms as other tickets.

The clause that is hardest to build is the hold. Unsold accessible seats may be released to the general public only when all the other seats in the house have sold, or all the other seats in the same section or price category have sold and the accessible seats are released within that section or category; a seller is never obliged to release them. A season ticket program carries an extra duty: once accessible seats have been released to subscribers without disabilities, the seller needs a process that prevents those seats from being automatically reassigned to the same subscribers next season. An automatic renewal of “your seats,” which is what subscription software is built to do, is precisely the thing the rule tells a theater to stop.

How many seats are we talking about? The number comes from the 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design, Table 221.2.1.1: one wheelchair space for 4 to 25 seats, two for 26 to 50, four for 51 to 150, five for 151 to 300 and six for 301 to 500, each with at least one companion seat beside it, plus designated aisle seats amounting to at least 5% of the aisle seats. In a 99-seat black box, four wheelchair spaces and four companion seats are 8 of the 99 seats, or 8.1% of the house, and if the house is sold as one section at one price, they cannot be released to someone who does not need them until the other 91 have sold. In a 250-seat house the same rule covers 10 seats, 4.0%; in a 400-seat house, 12 seats, 3.0%. Small theaters carry the largest share, and a platform that treats every seat alike will not hold them back on its own.

None of this is new, which is the uncomfortable part. A theater that sells everything else online and accessible seats only by phone, that shows a seat map in which wheelchair spaces are missing or unlabeled, that lets a subscriber renewal roll accessible seats forward by default, or that asks for a doctor’s note “to prevent abuse,” has a problem that predates the platform it uses. A platform can make it easier or harder to get right, but the duty stays with the theater.

Cinemas: the federal fee rule stops at the screen, but the showtime still has to say “captioned”

An independent cinema sits in a different legal position from the playhouse down the street, and the difference starts with the fee. Because FTC staff treat film screenings as outside Part 464, the federal requirement to show the total price first does not, in general, reach a movie ticket. That may be why Veezi’s help center, explaining its fee-inclusive pricing setting, cites the United Kingdom and “some American states, such as California” rather than the FTC, and why the setting has to be switched on. In Baltimore, though, the City ordinance reaches the film, and on our reading so does the state statute. Maryland’s §13–310.1 covers any ticket to a place of entertainment at a specified date and time, and the City’s Subtitle 16 names movies outright and applies to entertainment “recorded, televised, or otherwise.” A Baltimore cinema that adds a booking fee online should, on our reading, show it inside the first price exactly as a theater would, itemize it, and print the box office price on the ticket.

The tax treats the film differently from the play: one of Baltimore’s two reduced rates is reserved for single-screen cinemas. Since 1993, a single-screen cinema that rents its films through commercial distribution has paid 5% instead of 10%, as has any theater on the National Register of Historic Places. A multiplex pays 10%. A single-screen cinema that adds a second screen, unless its building is on the National Register, moves every ticket it sells from 5% to 10%, which is the kind of fact that belongs in the ticketing system rather than in the bookkeeper’s memory.

The obligation that reaches every showtime is accessibility. Since June 2, 2018, the ADA rule at 28 CFR 36.303(g) has required a cinema showing digital films to provide closed captioning and audio description whenever a film is distributed with them, with a minimum number of devices on hand: four captioning devices for a single auditorium, six for two to seven, eight for eight to fifteen, twelve for sixteen or more, and one audio description device for every two auditoriums, never fewer than two. Drive-ins are outside the rule, and auditoriums that show only analog film are deferred. The part that touches software is the notice. Whenever a cinema provides captioning and audio description, it must ensure that “all notices of movie showings and times at the box office and other ticketing locations, on Web sites and mobile apps, in newspapers, and over the telephone” tell people which movies or showings are available with them. Fandango and other third parties are not bound by that sentence unless the cinema controls them, but the cinema’s own showtime listing is. A showtime record therefore needs fields for closed captioning and audio description, and the website, the app, the email and the phone message all need to read them.

Maryland adds its own captioning statute. State Government §20–306(c) requires every motion picture house to provide working closed-captioning technology for each screening of a film produced with it, and requires an operator of a house with eight or more screens in the state to show at least two open-captioned screenings of each film every week during its first three weeks, for films shown at least five times a week. Bills to lower that threshold to four screens passed the House of Delegates in 2025 (105 to 33) and 2026 (126 to 5) and went no further in the Senate. None of the independent cinemas in our Baltimore census has eight screens, but a scheduling system that cannot mark a showing as open-captioned is a system a growing cinema will outgrow.

Finally, the concession stand brings in close to two-fifths of a cinema’s revenue, as the Economic Census figures earlier in this article show. Every food sale inside an area that charges admission is subject to Maryland’s 6% sales tax, with alcohol at 9%, and a combined ticket-and-popcorn bundle has to split its price between two taxes. A cinema that sells a $25 “movie and popcorn” offer online is selling an admission taxed under Title 4 and a snack taxed under Title 11 in one cart, and the itemized total the state and the City require has to show both.

Baltimore’s box offices, and what they show buyers and machines

To see how this plays out at home, we tried to list every theater company, presenting stage and independent cinema in Baltimore City and Baltimore County that sells tickets this season, starting from the Maryland Manual’s list of theaters and adding everything we could find. We kept 30 venues, 24 in the City and 6 in the County, of which 24 put on live work and 6 show films, and on October 10, 2026, we read each one’s website, followed its ticket links to one event, and checked its robots.txt and llms.txt files and those of its ticket host. We created no orders and entered no personal data, so anything that appears only inside a cart was out of our sight. Nine companies and cinemas on our starting list had closed, gone quiet or lost their websites since the last time anyone updated a directory: two domains no longer resolve, one is parked, one site is down, and one former company’s address now forwards to an unrelated personal website, which is a small advertisement for renewing your domain.

The first finding is fragmentation. The 27 venues whose platform we could identify use 16 different ones. Arts People serves four, TicketSpice and PatronManager three each, and Tessitura, RTS, Indy Systems and the Community College of Baltimore County’s UniversityTickets two each; the rest run on Ludus, Eventbrite, Square payment links, Wix Events, Neon CRM, Ticketbud, SECUTIX, Eventive and a local system called TIKES. The mid-sized nonprofits use donor-database platforms, the small companies use whatever was cheapest when someone set it up, and the cinemas use cinema systems. Nineteen of the 30 send the buyer to the vendor’s own domain to pay. Four sell on their own domain, two use a subdomain named after the theater that points to the vendor, one embeds a vendor widget on its own site, and one sells through a partner theater’s system.

The second is the fee, which goes three different ways in one city. Creative Alliance in Highlandtown moved to all-in pricing in January 2026 and says plainly that “all service fees are included in the initial listed price,” with fees waived for its members. A presenting house in the County states its $2 per-ticket fee next to the price and charges it at the box office too. One cinema shows its $4 online fee and the County’s 10% admissions tax as separate lines on the order form before payment, and charges no fee at its cash-only gate. Ten venues show a first price on the page, from $10 to $38 with a median of $25, and six of those show no fee text near it; whether a fee appears later we could not see without a cart. Two companies using TicketSpice had switched the buyer fee off entirely.

The third is the wheelchair seat, and it is the result we would most like to see change. Exactly one venue, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, lets a buyer choose a wheelchair or companion seat online, by selecting seats marked with an icon on the seat map. Two others ask wheelchair users to call, one says its theater has no wheelchair access at all, five sell general admission, and for the rest we could not see a seat map without starting a purchase. Two theaters list audio-described performances in October and November, and none of the Baltimore cinema listings we could read marks a showing as captioned or audio-described.

The fourth is what machines can read. Only 3 of the 30 venues publish any schema.org Event data, and only one of them, Baltimore Improv Group, which sells $10 tickets through Wix on its own domain, includes a price in it. None of the 24 robots.txt files we could read on the venues’ own sites blocks AI crawlers, but the ticket hosts used by five venues, the Salesforce sites behind PatronManager and the college’s UniversityTickets system, allow Googlebot and refuse every other crawler, so an AI assistant asked what is playing in Baltimore this weekend and what it costs can read the theater’s page but not the page that holds the price and the seats. Six venues have an llms.txt file, and five of those are the same template generated by Wix, which also advertises an AI agent endpoint on sites that sell no tickets through it.

And the box office is where Baltimore’s theaters get inventive. Fells Point Corner Theatre sells a $50 “Stage Hand” ticket alongside its $25 seat to pay for repairs to its stage, plus pay-what-you-can previews; Everyman offers pay-what-you-choose dress rehearsals; Black Cherry Puppet Theater runs a sliding scale; Iron Crow sells $25 seats by lottery. Each is a product with rules, a minimum, a cap or a draw, and each has to show a total price, an accessible seat at that price, and the right tax. Few of them fit neatly into a typical platform’s settings; all of them are a few lines in a box office built for the theater.

What 144 theaters and cinemas across the country run on

Baltimore’s 30 venues are a small group, so we also drew a national sample. OpenStreetMap lists 10,964 theaters and 5,489 cinemas in the United States, and 5,345 of those listings carry a website. After removing cinema chains, the operators of large venues and listings that pointed to social media, we drew 120 theater websites and 60 cinema websites at random and read each one on October 10, 2026: its homepage, its first ticket link, its robots.txt and its llms.txt. We could read 144 of the 180, in 38 states and territories. Of the 36 we could not, sixteen had dead or stale domains, and five of those now serve gambling, spam or somebody else’s content, which is what happens to a theater’s address when nobody renews it.

The market has no center. The sites that sell online run on 45 named platforms. Among the 92 smaller theaters, software made for the arts serves 52% and general event or payment tools such as Eventbrite, Etix and Wix serve 24%; the most common single product, OvationTix, now sold as AudienceView Professional, holds 9 of the 92. The largest houses run on Ticketmaster and its relatives. Independent cinemas are the least online of all: 13 of the 37 showed no way to buy a ticket online, several of them saying so in words like “cash only,” and the rest are split among cinema systems such as Internet Ticketing, Veezi, RTS and INDY, general online-store tools such as Square and Shopify, and Fandango.

Wherever a show is listed, the sale mostly happens somewhere else. Of the 119 sites where we found online sales, 89, or 75%, send the buyer to the vendor’s domain to pay; only 30 keep the buyer on the theater’s own domain or on a subdomain named after it. That matters for what machines can see. We followed 61 ticket links to vendor pages, and 32 of them refused our scripted reader with a block page or a bot challenge, including all 12 Ticketmaster pages, all 4 Ludus pages and 6 of 7 OvationTix pages, while only 3 of 143 venues’ own sites block an AI crawler by name. Only 14 of the 144 sites, under 10%, describe their events in schema.org Event data, five of those from a single national venue company’s template, and of the 29 vendor ticket pages that loaded, only Eventbrite’s and TicketWeb’s carried Event data at all. The llms.txt files that 27 sites publish are mostly generated by Wix, Yoast or All in One SEO rather than written (20 of the 27), and a few describe the wrong thing: one, after a change of domain, describes a brewery.

And the captioning notice, the ADA requirement every cinema showing digital films with captioning has to meet on its own website, was one of the rarest things we measured: 1 of 37 independent cinemas (1 of the 32 that are not drive-ins, which the rule exempts) mentioned captioning or audio description anywhere we looked, and that one only through an icon in its platform’s showtime data. We cannot tell from outside which cinemas provide the devices; we can tell that almost none of them says so where a buyer, or an AI assistant answering a buyer, would look.

How to sell theater and cinema tickets online when the box office is the store

A theater’s ticket page is an online store with an unusual product. Every item is perishable at a known minute, every seat is unique, a few seats are reserved by law for particular buyers, the price can depend on who is on stage that night, and the tax on who presents the show and in which building. Most of the software in this article handles the ordinary half of that well. What follows is the other half: the parts that the laws above and the habits of Baltimore’s own theaters turn into requirements, and which a general-purpose platform tends to leave as a setting nobody switched on.

One price on the first screen, built from parts the buyer can see

Start with the price, because three laws now describe it. The number a buyer sees first, in a listing, on a season page, in an email or an ad, has to be the total: the face value, every fee the buyer cannot avoid and, in Maryland, the tax. The itemized breakdown has to be provided at every step (we would show it on the screen, or at most one tap away), in type at least as large as the price under Baltimore’s ordinance, with each fee named for what it pays for rather than called a convenience or service fee. The box office price has to be printed on the ticket itself. A refund for a canceled performance has to return all of it, fees and taxes included. None of that is hard to build if the price is kept as data, a face value plus a list of named fees plus a tax status per event, and computed in one place for every screen, email and feed. It is very hard to retrofit when the fee is a checkbox in the platform’s settings and the tax is a number somebody typed into a template.

Two habits need to change with it. Member and subscriber prices are fine, but the price advertised to everyone has to be the one everyone pays, with the member price appearing once a buyer has signed in. And a “from” price has to come from live inventory. As the FTC’s theater example above shows, “from $25” should change by itself on the afternoon the last $25 seat goes.

The seat map is inventory with rules

In a reserved-seat house, each seat in the database needs more than a row and a number. Wheelchair spaces and companion seats need to be their own types, identified on the public map with the same kind of text or symbols used for every other seat, sold at every price level, held until the release conditions in the ADA rule are met section by section and price category by price category, and sold together with up to three neighboring seats. The checkout may ask at most one question for a single event and may require a written attestation for a subscription, but never a doctor’s note. Subscription renewals need a rule that stops released accessible seats from rolling forward to the same holders next season. Under Maryland law, the seat number and section have to appear on every step of the purchase, and under Baltimore’s, the box office price has to appear on the ticket. In our Baltimore census, exactly one box office showed a way for a wheelchair user to pick a seat online, and most showed no seat map at all until a purchase began, so for most of them we could not tell whether a wheelchair user could.

Subscriptions, passes, memberships and gift cards

The products that keep a small theater alive between hits are the ones with the most rules attached. A subscription or membership that renews by itself is covered by Maryland’s automatic renewal law, Commercial Law §14–1329, in force since June 1, 2026: cancellation must be at least as easy as signing up, an online sign-up needs a direct cancellation link or button or a ready-made cancellation email, and a renewal of a year or more needs a notice sent between 15 and 45 days before it. We have written about how that law plays out for fitness studios and car wash memberships; a theater membership is the same problem with a seat attached. Gift certificates may not expire or carry a fee within four years of purchase under §14–1319, so a voucher system needs a purchase date and no automatic expiry. And the evidence shows both the pressure on these products and the prize. Theatre Communications Group counts subscription income a third below 2019 after inflation, while the Art House Convergence’s 2026 audience survey found that 43% of its respondents belong to their cinema’s membership program and 61% use the cinema’s emails to choose what to see. The membership list is the store’s best customer list, which is a reason to keep it on systems the theater controls.

The products Baltimore’s theaters invent are the ones platforms handle least well. A $50 “Stage Hand” ticket that helps pay for a repaired stage is, in substance, a seat plus a contribution, and a box office that can sell it as both can issue a proper receipt for the part that is a gift. Pay-what-you-can previews need a floor, a ceiling and every unavoidable fee shown inside whatever amount the buyer chooses. A sliding scale needs a way to show the scale without implying the low price is a discount for some buyers only. A $25 lottery is a stage of sale, and under the ADA accessible seats have to be offered during lotteries and wait-lists exactly as during general sales. Each of these is a small piece of logic, and each is the kind of thing a theater ends up running through a spreadsheet and a payment link because its box office will not do it.

Concessions, merchandise and the second cart

For a cinema, the concession stand is not an extra; it is 38 cents of every revenue dollar. For a theater, it is drinks at intermission, a cast album and a T-shirt. Pre-ordering online moves the counter into the cart, and the taxes come with it: food and drink sold inside an area that charges admission is subject to Maryland’s 6% sales tax and alcohol to 9%, while the ticket carries the admissions tax or none, so a bundle has to split its price. Ticketing platforms meter these sales too, Ludus at 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction for retail and ThunderTix at 2% of concession and membership sales, which is worth adding to the comparison before choosing one.

What Google and AI assistants can read about a show

People now find a play or a film by asking a search engine or an assistant what is on this weekend, and the answer can only be as good as what the theater publishes. Google’s event documentation, updated in September 2026, asks for one page per event with schema.org Event data on it, a physical location, a start time and an offer whose URL Googlebot is allowed to crawl, and it defines the offer’s price as “the lowest available price available for your tickets, including service charges and fees,” to be updated “as prices change or tickets sell out.” That is the all-in rule again, in a search engine’s words. Google’s guide for ticketing partners asks for a fee breakdown whenever a price does not include fees, and Google’s Shopping listings do not accept event tickets at all; tickets reach Google through events data and through ticketing companies that have signed a content agreement with it. If your platform is one of those partners, Google’s advice is simply to keep posting there, which also means the listing Google shows may lead to the vendor’s page rather than yours. And since August 31, 2026, Search Console has given every site a control over whether its pages appear in Google’s generative AI features; on a vendor’s domain, the vendor holds that switch.

Our Baltimore census and national sample show how little of this most theaters control. Under 10% of the 144 sites we read describe their events in structured data, and in Baltimore only one includes a price in it. Most send buyers to a vendor’s domain, and 32 of the 61 vendor ticket pages we tried turned away our automated reader, while the hosts behind five Baltimore box offices allow Google’s crawler and refuse every other one. An assistant asked about Saturday’s show can often read the theater’s description of it but not the price or the seats.

Which vendor sells the tickets decides what machines see, and the vendors differ more than their marketing suggests. The marketplaces publish full Event data with a price on their own pages: on the samples we fetched, Eventbrite, SimpleTix, Leap, TicketLeap and Humanitix all did, which means the search credit for a theater’s show accrues to the vendor’s domain. Several arts platforms serve event pages that are empty until a script runs; on the OvationTix, Arts People and Eventive pages we fetched, a reader that does not run JavaScript finds no event at all. On the PatronManager box office we checked, every event shares one address and differs only after a # sign, while Google asks for “a unique URL (a leaf page)” for each event. And the robots.txt file on Spektrix’s hosted system pages tells every crawler, Googlebot included, to stay out. A theater an hour up the road shows the alternative: the Weinberg Center in Frederick sells through Spektrix but publishes each show on its own site as a TheaterEvent with prices and a link to buy.

The big ticket sellers have built their own way in, and Google has built its agentic ticket booking in AI Mode with partners such as Ticketmaster, StubHub and SeatGeek. StubHub launched an app inside ChatGPT in December 2025 that “sends you straight to StubHub to complete purchase,” and Ticketmaster followed in April 2026 and now lists partnerships with Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and Alexa+ among others; in both cases the purchase finishes on the seller’s site. OpenAI, for its part, told merchants in March 2026 that its first in-chat checkout “did not offer the level of flexibility” it wanted and let them use their own checkouts. A 120-seat theater will not get an app inside an assistant. What it can have is a page on its own domain that any machine can read: each performance or showing marked up as an Event, TheaterEvent or ScreeningEvent with the real total price, the availability, the venue’s accessibility details and, for a cinema, which showings are captioned; crawler rules the theater chose itself; and the same facts in plain text. Google says it ignores llms.txt files and does not need structured data for its AI features, so neither is a ranking trick, but other assistants read pages too, and a page that states the price, the seats and the access plainly is one any of them can quote correctly.

A note for readers in Lithuania

Part of our team works from Lithuania, where the same trade runs on a very different market structure. Most of Vilnius’s state theaters do not run their own box office at all. The National Drama Theatre, the Youth Theatre, Keistuolių teatras and the Vilnius City Theatre sell through Bilietai.lt, part of the Estonian Piletilevi group, whose buyer FAQ lists a service fee of usually up to €2.50 a ticket, €0.79 for an e-ticket and €0.80 at a box office, and notes that discounts apply to the ticket price but never to the fees. The exceptions are instructive: the National Kaunas Drama Theatre sells through its own e-shop, the opera runs its own cart, and the Pasaka cinema in Vilnius sells on a white-label site of its own. In Lithuania, owning the box office is what the largest and the most independent institutions do; in Baltimore, only a handful do.

Lithuania has also been the source of one of the European Union’s ticketing rules. In Tiketa (C-536/20), a case referred by Lithuania’s Supreme Court after a buyer traveled to a canceled concert, the Court of Justice held in 2022 that a ticketing platform acting for an organizer can itself be a “trader” owing the buyer consumer-law duties, which is the European cousin of the FTC’s refusal to give platforms immunity. The rest of the European picture runs parallel to the American one. Buyers of tickets for a dated event have no 14-day right to withdraw. The Commission’s 2021 guidance on unfair commercial practices already treats unavoidable charges added along the way as drip pricing that “should have been included in the price from the outset,” and the Digital Fairness Act, which the Commission has announced for the fourth quarter of 2026 but not yet published, is expected to deal with unfair pricing, while consumer and fan groups are pressing the Commission to use it to ban dynamic pricing for live events. Refund terms are where the two systems part: one Lithuanian platform’s terms say its additional fees are not refunded when an event is canceled or postponed, which a Maryland seller could not say about a canceled performance.

Two newer rules matter for anyone building a box office for both markets. Since January 1, 2026, Lithuania’s VAT on admission to arts and cultural events has been 12% instead of 9%, as Bilietai.lt reminded organizers in a March 2026 notice; tickets paid for by December 31, 2025, kept the old rate, so a ticketing system there had to know the payment date as well as the performance date. And since June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act has applied to e-commerce services, which include selling theater tickets online; Lithuania applies it through Law No. XIV-1633 on accessibility requirements for products and services, supervised mainly by the State Consumer Rights Protection Authority according to a commentary published by LRT. Micro-enterprises providing services, with fewer than 10 staff and no more than €2 million in turnover or balance sheet, are exempt. Prices are moving too: a tv3.lt report found that the cheapest seats for big foreign concerts in Lithuania rose from about €59 in 2022 to €82 in 2024. The European rules and the American ones (Maryland’s on price, the ADA’s on access) arrive at the same design from different directions: the first price the buyer sees must be the price, and the checkout must work for everyone.

What custom actually costs, and when it pays

We price every project at a fixed fee, agreed before we start, and publish the starting points on our pricing page. For a theater company, a presenting house or an independent cinema, the packages map onto this article like this.

Most of our projects land between $6,000 and $30,000, and none requires you to replace a donor database, a point-of-sale terminal or an accounting package that already works; the demos page shows finished work. In Maryland, the state’s 3% tax on software and IT services applies to a custom build, so the Online Store package starts at $6,180 with tax.

Whether it pays is mostly arithmetic, and for the smallest companies the honest answer is often that it does not. A company that sells 2,000 general admission tickets a year at $20 and passes a platform fee to its audience pays nothing for its box office, and its audience pays about $3,500 a year at Ludus’s rate; that is not a reason to commission software. The case changes with volume and with the rules. If our Theater A absorbed Ludus’s fee, it would pay $13,500 a year, of which about $7,560 is the platform’s share on top of what card processing alone would cost; on Eventbrite the platform’s share would be $16,680. An Online Store at $6,180 with tax is covered by one year of that difference, with hosting and maintenance as a much smaller running cost, and the money stays with the theater or comes off the price its audience pays. For a presenting house or a cinema the stronger case is often compliance rather than fees: a tax status that is wrong on every rented night, a seat map a wheelchair user cannot use, a showtime page that never says “captioned,” or a ticket that does not carry its box office price, multiplied by every ticket sold.

What we would build for a Baltimore theater or cinema

If a Baltimore theater company, presenting house or independent cinema asked us to fix the problems in this article without replacing anything that already works, this is what we would build, roughly in this order.

• A price book kept as data. Face values by section and performance, every fee named for what it pays for, and a tax status for each event worked out from who presents it, which building it is in and whether an exemption’s clock has run out, all computed in one place for the website, the season brochure, emails, feeds, the ticket itself and the phone script.
• A checkout that shows the total first. The total price and its itemized breakdown on the listing and at every step, the seat number and section throughout, the box office price on the ticket, and a refund that returns fees and taxes when a performance is canceled.
• A seat map that knows the ADA. Wheelchair spaces and companion seats as their own inventory, identified on the map the same way as every other seat, sold online at every price level, held until the release conditions are met in each section and price category, sold with up to three neighboring seats, and protected from being rolled forward in subscription renewals.
• The products a theater actually sells. Subscriptions and flex passes, memberships with Maryland’s cancellation and renewal-notice rules built in, gift certificates without an expiry date, pay-what-you-can and sliding-scale seats, lotteries that include accessible seats, and donations offered as a genuine choice rather than a pre-checked box.
• Showtimes that say what a cinema provides. Closed captioning, audio description and open-caption flags on every showing, carried automatically to the website, the app, emails and the phone message, with a count of working devices against the rule’s minimum for the building.
• A ledger for the admissions tax. Receipts by jurisdiction, activity and exemption, complimentary tickets counted, a monthly figure ready for electronic filing, and the sales tax on concessions kept apart from the tax on admissions.
• One set of facts for people and machines. Every performance and showing published on the theater’s own domain as schema.org Event data with its real total price, availability and accessibility details, an llms.txt file somebody actually wrote, and crawler rules the theater chose rather than ones it inherited from its ticket vendor.

For a theater that already runs a donor database with a box office attached, most of this sits beside what it has. The donor records, the payment processor and the accounting package stay where they are; the price book, the display rules, the seat inventory, the tax ledger and the published facts are the parts we would build and hand over to you to own.

Build, buy, or leave it alone

Most small theaters should buy their box office, and many should keep the one they have. A company that sells a few thousand general admission seats a year is well served by a platform that costs it nothing and adds a fee its audience can see: on our numbers that fee is about $2 to $4 on a $30 ticket, and there is no software we could write that would be cheaper to own at that size. The products in this article do the core job well, selling a seat, scanning the ticket at the door and paying the theater, and the people behind them know theater. Choose by the meter, not the logo: per ticket, per order, per station or per month, and who pays it.

Then ask every vendor six questions, in writing, before you sign or renew. Does your all-in display include the City or County admissions and amusement tax, and does it show an itemized breakdown at every step, as §13–310.1 requires? Does your ticket template print the box office price, as Baltimore’s ordinance requires? Can a wheelchair user choose a wheelchair space and companion seats online, and do your holds release accessible seats only under the ADA’s conditions? Do you refund your fee when a performance is canceled? Can I export every patron, order and donation in a usable format whenever I like? And do your ticket pages let search engines and AI assistants read my shows and prices, or does your robots file turn them away? A vendor that answers all six well has earned the renewal.

If you run a mid-sized nonprofit on a donor database such as PatronManager, Tessitura or Spektrix, keep it. Its value is the record of who gave, who subscribed and who came back, and replacing that is rarely worth the risk. Build around it instead: a price display that meets Maryland’s itemization rule, a seat map that sells accessible seats online, a tax status per event, structured data on your own domain, and the reports your board and the Comptroller actually ask for.

If you present other companies’ work or rent your stage, the tax status per event is where the money leaks. A grant-funded nonprofit presenter, a registered arts and entertainment enterprise and a commercial promoter can use the same room in the same week, and only the promoter owes the admissions tax, so a box office set up with a single rate will be wrong some nights of the week. If you run an independent cinema, keep your cinema point of sale, switch on the fee-inclusive setting if it has one, make sure your own showtime pages say which showings are captioned or audio-described, and think about owning the parts your system sells least well: memberships, concession pre-orders and events that are not films.

Leave alone what is cheap and works: the door scanner, the card processor contract if its rate is good, the donor database, the accounting package. Build the few things listed above, which no platform we read sells to a Baltimore theater in a form it controls. Our guide to custom software in Baltimore explains how we work, and our guide to Maryland’s privacy law for online stores covers what a patron list of tens of thousands of Marylanders brings with it. If you want to find out which of these would pay for you, bring us a season of orders and your fee settings, and we will show you.

Questions theaters, cinemas and their audiences ask us

What is the best ticketing software for a small theater?

There is no single best one; there is a best meter for your size. A company selling a few thousand general admission tickets a year usually does well on a per-ticket platform that costs the theater nothing, such as BookTix (3.75% plus 90 cents a ticket), Ludus (5% plus 75 cents) or TicketSpice (99 cents plus card processing), while a reserved-seat house with a subscription season may prefer ThunderTix ($25 a month plus $1.25 a ticket after the first 20) or a donor database such as Spektrix, PatronManager or Tessitura, which quote privately. Before choosing, check that the product shows the total price including fees and the admissions tax on the first screen, sells wheelchair spaces online and refunds its fee when a show is canceled.

How much does theater ticketing software cost?

On October 10, 2026, published per-ticket prices ran from 85 cents pay as you go at Ticket Tailor, plus card processing, to $3.85 on a $30 ticket at Eventbrite (3.7% plus $1.79 a ticket and 2.9% of the order), and about $4 at Events.com once card processing is added. For a model 120-seat theater selling 6,000 tickets a year at $30, a year of ticketing would cost between about $11,000 and $23,600, or 6% to 13% of ticket revenue, if the theater absorbed every fee, card processing included. Most small theaters pass the fee to buyers instead, which makes the software free to the theater but not to its audience. The only flat published price we found is a cinema system, RTS, at $2,140 a year for one station.

Do theater ticket prices have to include fees?

Yes. Since May 12, 2025, the FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees (16 CFR Part 464) has required any business that shows a price for a live-event ticket to show the total price, including every mandatory fee, more prominently than any other price information; only government charges, shipping and optional extras may be added later, and they must be disclosed before payment. FTC staff also tell sellers to avoid vague labels such as “convenience fee,” “service fee” and “processing fee.” In Maryland the state rule goes further: since July 1, 2024, Commercial Law §13–310.1 has required the listing and every step of the purchase to show the total including all fees and taxes, an itemized list of the charges, and the seat number and section.

Does the FTC junk fee rule apply to movie theaters?

In general, no. The final rule’s preamble says “a movie ticket is not a covered good or service,” and the FTC’s compliance guide says film screenings are generally not live events covered by the rule. In Maryland, though, the state ticket statute applies to any ticket for a place of entertainment at a set date and time, which on our reading includes a cinema, and Baltimore City’s ticket ordinance names movies expressly. A Baltimore cinema that adds an online booking fee should therefore show it in the first price, itemize it and print the box office price on the ticket.

What is the admissions and amusement tax on theater and movie tickets in Baltimore?

Baltimore City charges 10% of gross receipts from admissions, or 5% for a theater on the National Register of Historic Places and for a single-screen cinema that rents its films commercially (City Code Article 28, §19–1). State law forbids the tax on a theatrical event presented by a nonprofit cultural group that receives a Maryland State Arts Council grant (Tax-General §4–103), and the City exempts registered arts and entertainment enterprises in its four arts districts for 10 years from registration. Baltimore County charges 10%. Complimentary tickets carry 15 cents each in the City, returns are due monthly by the 10th, and returns for periods after December 31, 2026, must be filed electronically.

How many wheelchair spaces does a theater need?

Under Table 221.2.1.1 of the 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design, an assembly area with 4 to 25 seats needs one wheelchair space, 26 to 50 seats need two, 51 to 150 need four, 151 to 300 need five and 301 to 500 need six, each with at least one companion seat beside it; at least 5% of aisle seats must also be designated aisle seats. In a 99-seat theater that is eight of the 99 seats, about 8%. The ticketing rule at 28 CFR 36.302(f) then requires those seats to be sold through the same channels, at the same hours and at every price level, and lets them be released to other buyers only once the rest of the house, section or price category has sold.

Who can buy accessible seats, and can a theater ask for proof of disability?

Accessible seats are for people who use a wheelchair or need the features of those seats, and the people buying with them, but a theater may not require proof of disability, such as a doctor’s note, before selling them. For a single event it may ask whether the buyer, or the person the buyer is purchasing for, has a mobility disability or needs the accessible features; for a subscription or other series it may ask for a written attestation. A wheelchair user may buy up to three more seats in the same row next to the wheelchair space, if they are available.

Do movie theaters have to offer closed captioning and audio description?

Yes, for digital films distributed with them. Since June 2, 2018, 28 CFR 36.303(g) has required cinemas to provide closed captioning and audio description, with at least four captioning devices for a single auditorium (six for two to seven auditoriums) and one audio description device for every two auditoriums, never fewer than two; drive-ins are excluded. Every showtime notice, on the website, the app, at the box office and on the phone, must say which showings have captioning and audio description. Maryland’s State Government §20–306 also requires operators of houses with eight or more screens to offer at least two open-captioned screenings of each film every week during its first three weeks.

Is it legal to resell theater tickets in Maryland?

Yes, with limits. Commercial Law §13–310.1 bans resellers from selling speculative tickets they do not yet hold, requires resale listings to show the total price including fees and taxes, and requires a full refund, fees included, if a ticket is counterfeit, the event is canceled or the ticket does not match its description; a resale price cap considered in 2024 was dropped before enactment, and a 2026 bill to add one failed. Baltimore City separately forbids using “ticket purchasing software,” which its code defines as software that bypasses a ticket seller’s security measures or purchase limits (City Code Article 2, §17-6), and the federal BOTS Act bans getting around purchase limits at venues with more than 200 seats.

How much does it cost to build a custom box office or ticketing system?

With us, a one-week working prototype on your own season data costs $3,500, an online box office on your own domain starts at $6,000 ($6,180 with Maryland’s 3% tax on IT services), and a front-of-house app or a full operations system starts at $12,000, all at a fixed price agreed before we start. For a 120-seat theater selling 6,000 tickets a year at $30, the platform’s share of Ludus’s fee above card processing is about $7,560 a year and Eventbrite’s about $16,680, so a store on your own domain can pay for itself within a year at that size; a company selling 2,000 tickets a year should usually keep a free-to-the-theater platform.