William P.
Cheap, but has significant issues
We've used TicketBud for two events now in the 200-250 person range. On the upside, they're cheap. However, the downside is that they feel cheap. The last time we used them, I think we reported half a dozen bugs, most of them obvious. But they seemed like they were just getting started, so this year I figured we'd give them the benefit of the doubt and try again. On the upside, the basics do seem to work. You can put some tickets up for sale, send people off to PayPal, and get money. Last time we successfully used their android app to check people in. But the edge cases are rough. For example, we had early-bird tickets and regular tickets. When we were down to 1 early-bird ticket TicketBud would still let people try to buy up to 20 of them. Then the attempt would blow up with some sort of error. When they came back to the page, it would show that the early-bird tickets were sold out, so they felt cheated. We've got a half-dozen people upset on our Facebook page because of this. I finally had to just reduce the number of early-bird tickets by 1 so that people trying to buy in pairs would stop getting hit with this. We had a similar problem when the event was almost sold out: mysterious site failures and angry attendees. Another big problem: they don't appear to have waitlist functionality. I just had to go build something with Google Forms and stick it half-assedly in the page. Speaking of which, their supposedly WYSIWYG editor ends up with the content looking fairly different on the two pages. I had to spend a bunch of time messing with the raw HTML to get the page to come out right. And there are a number of other issues that, at least to this software developer's eye, look obvious. I thought using TicketBud was a way to save money for my guests, and I guess it did. But next time I'm going to try something else in hopes of finding something better built.