Venue Revenue Check
Independent · Berlin · For independent venues
For independent wedding & event venues

You priced the venue by gut, then quietly wondered how much you left on the table.

It's the single most important number in the business, and most owners set it on a feeling and hope it's about right. I'd like to build a way for independent venues to see where their pricing and what's bundled into it actually sit, and where the per-event money is most likely hiding. It doesn't exist yet, so I'm starting by doing it by hand, for free.

Get your free venue revenue check → or just email me
~6%of venues rent the room and nothing else. The rest bundle, and how well is usually where the money sits.
$31kis roughly what an established venue averages per event. A few hundred unrealized per booking adds up by season's end.
1 personreads every check. This is early, it's me, and your input shapes what gets built.
Sound familiar

Plenty of owners have said versions of this in public.

These are real things independent venue owners have written or said on their own blogs and podcasts. None of them know me. I'm including them because they put it better than I could.

“
Trying to determine price for your venue may seem frightening; it was for me!
Teri · barn & home venue owner
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Most venues around here don't list their prices. We just did what everyone else was doing.
Kenzie · venue co-owner, Austin TX
“
As a wedding venue owner, I see a lot of stress come from money surprises.
Tay · vineyard venue owner, Virginia
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I wanted to see how many hours I'd worked. It came down to $4.39 an hour. It's heartbreaking.
John · barn venue owner, North Carolina
Where the money usually hides

The gap between renting a room and selling an evening is wider than it looks.

By industry counts, only around 6% of venues rent the bare space and stop there. Almost everyone bundles something. The open question is rarely whether to bundle, it's whether the tiers are built to move couples up to the package that fits them, or just patched together to cover costs. That second one is usually where the per-event money is sitting, untouched.

Room only
~$7k–9k
A typical booking when the venue sells the space and lets the couple bring everything else.
Room, plus the evening around it
~$28k
A structural estimate of the same date when catering, bar, rentals, and coordination are folded into clear tiers.

Most venues land somewhere between those two numbers. A free check is just a careful look at where you sit on that line, and which one or two moves would lift the average without scaring off the couples you want.

Figures are rough industry estimates, not promises: the ~6% space-only share is from The Knot's 2026 venue data as cited by MMCG Invest; the room-only vs. bundled range is a structural model summarized at PerfectVenue. Your venue's real numbers are what the check is for.

The free venue revenue check

A read on your pricing, done by hand, with nothing to buy at the end.

01 / You send

Your booking basics

Roughly how many events you do a year, your average all-in price, what's included versus charged on top, and the one part of your pricing you're least sure about. A few minutes, no spreadsheets required.

02 / I look

Where you sit, and where the upside is

I read it by hand and come back by email: a plain take on how your pricing and tiers compare to similar independent venues, and the one or two places the per-event upside looks biggest for a venue like yours.

03 / If it helps

Twenty minutes, only if you want it

If the read is useful, we can spend twenty minutes going through it together and what you'd try first. If it isn't, you've lost nothing and I've learned something. That's a fair trade right now.

I do these one at a time, by hand. That's the point. I want to learn what's actually useful to owners before I build anything, which is the honest reason it's free.

How your numbers are handled

The honest part about your numbers

Doing these checks is also how I'd slowly build a picture of what independent venues your size actually charge, because that comparison doesn't really exist yet for this segment. I want to be straight about that rather than pretend the favor only runs one way.

So here is the line I hold, and you can hold me to it:

✓Your numbers are used to give you your read, and nothing else.
✓They are never shown to another venue, and never attached to your name in anything I share.
✓Any comparison I ever publish would be pooled across enough venues that no single one can be picked out.
✓I'm not building a price list anyone can look you up in, and I'm not here to help venues coordinate what they charge.

This is market research meant to help you read your own pricing. Your price stays your decision.

Who's behind this
Christo Wilken

I'm Christo.

Software & data, based in Berlin

I came at this from the numbers side, not from inside the wedding business. I went through what venue owners say about pricing, on their blogs, on podcasts, and in the owner groups, and the same thing kept coming up: people who are genuinely good at hospitality, running the whole place themselves, set the most important number in the business on a feeling and hope it holds. One owner described being terrified to charge more. An innkeeper a few doors down from this problem said the biggest obstacle to pricing well wasn't his guests, it was himself.

I'd like to build something that takes the guessing out of it for independent venues, the kind that get rolled up or out-marketed precisely because nobody's helping them with this. The right version of that comes from the people who live it, which is why I'm starting with free checks and conversations instead of a finished product. If you tell me where it's actually useful, I'll build toward that.

Start your check

Send me your booking basics. I'll come back with where the money's most likely hiding.

A few fields below is enough to get started. Whatever you share is used only to give you your read, and it shapes what I end up building. No obligation, and nothing to buy.

or email me directly at christo@9592.tech

I read every message myself. Your details are used only to reply to you about this, and they're never shared or sold.

Prefer to just talk it through first? You can grab twenty minutes here.