How many tickets do you need, and who do they come from?

Start from your budget, ticket price, and the platform, exhibitor, and distributor fees that come off every sale, not from a guess at your audience. This tool works backwards from your true break-even ticket count to exactly who you need to reach, from the people who already know you to the ones who only show up once everyone else has, and lets you download the result as a canvas to work from.

Your audience

Primary and secondary audience

Pick your primary quadrant, then optionally a secondary. Indie films travel best when they own one quadrant deeply, or two at most, not all four.

Funding & pricing

Production budget

Break-even multiplier

Not the distributor’s cut, that’s the field below. This is what sits on top of your production budget in the payout waterfall: marketing spend to reach a second wave, taxes, and legal/E&O. Grassroots, minimal paid marketing: often 1.2 to 1.5x. Real ad spend to reach the early and late majority: often 1.8 to 2.5x+.

Ticket price

What indie tickets typically go for

Virtual festival screening (Eventive)$10–$19

Community theatrical (Gathr)$10–$17

Filmmaker-set streaming (Kinema)$8–$15

Standard US theatrical, for reference$16

For orientation only. Varies by festival, market, and film, and isn’t applied here automatically.

Platform & payment processing

Stripe and ticketing-platform fees, taken off each ticket before the exhibitor and distributor split. Defaults to Stripe’s standard rate.

Exhibitor commission

The venue or theatre's cut of what's left after platform fees. Use 0% if self-presenting.

Distributor commission

Applied to what is left after the exhibitor's cut. A rough industry norm is 15% production / 35% distributor / 50% exhibitor. Set this to 0% to model going fully direct, no distributor, and see the marketing budget that opens up below.

Break-even

Enter your production budget, break-even multiplier, and ticket price to see how many tickets you need to sell and how large your audience needs to be to get there.

Most indie funding math starts from the wrong end: pick a budget, guess a marketing plan, hope the audience shows up. This tool reverses that. It starts from your budget, pricing, and commissions, calculates the true break-even ticket count, and works backwards through the diffusion curve to tell you exactly how large your audience needs to be: not just the people you can reach with direct marketing, but all five adoption bands of one demographic quadrant. It covers exhibition revenue only; any later earnings, an OTT licensing deal, a streaming sale, merchandise, sit outside this model as a bonus, not a break-even input.

If the required audience feels out of reach, the honest answer usually is not “market harder.” It is a smaller budget, a different price, or a longer runway to build the audience before production starts.