MyPlots Takes 20% of Every Ticket. That Is Not a Software Fee

The most expensive take rate in consumer ticketing sits on the one category insurers refuse to write, and the company collecting it says it has no idea who most of its hosts are.

MyPlots, the Los Angeles party app founded by 21-year-old Jack Schwartz, keeps 20% of every ticket sold through it. Eventbrite keeps 8.4% on a $100 ticket. Airbnb keeps 14% to 16% from hosts and includes $1 million of liability insurance plus a machine-learning system built to stop parties from happening. MyPlots charges more than any of them and includes none of it. The company is now raising $10 million while its founder tells reporters he has no connection to most of the events his platform processes payments for.

Schwartz answered a WIRED reporter’s question about table pricing by pulling $27,500 in cash out of a leather jacket and sliding it across a countertop. Twenty percent of that envelope belongs to his company. None of the 20% buys a permit, a fire marshal sign-off, an occupancy certificate, or a policy that would respond if a floor gave out under a crowd.

What Happened

WIRED published a feature on August 21, 2026 about the teenage party economy in West Los Angeles, with Schwartz and MyPlots at the center of it. The reporting established the platform’s core numbers: an app launched in January 2025, more than one million users, a 20% cut of all ticket sales, and a host base the founder does not know.

Schwartz told the reporter he has no idea who 95% of the promoters using his app are, and that he bears no legal responsibility for what happens at their events. He described the technology as facilitating ticket sales. On the same page, he described being selective about the parties he throws under his own name, because the liability is not worth a few thousand dollars.

The app nominally requires users to be 18. Schwartz conceded to WIRED that people find ways around that. Payments run through Stripe, which permits accounts for users as young as 13 when a parent is enrolled.

William Lemmon, principal broker at Broadway Insurance Services, drew the line for WIRED with unusual precision. Take a party and make everyone 21, he said, and it is insurable. Add minors and alcohol, and no carrier will knowingly write it.

That sentence is the whole business model story.

The Backstory

Schwartz started throwing parties in Los Angeles at 14, first in a rec room at his father’s apartment complex, later at rented Hollywood spaces. He built the audience on Instagram and Snap before he built any software. A high school classmate who now runs MyPlots marketing told WIRED that everyone at Palisades Charter High School called him Gatsby.

The pre-app version ran on Venmo, Zelle and cash at the door. Schwartz has said the mess of collecting payments across three rails, with no record of who paid, gave him the product idea. He launched the app in January 2025, promoted an after-prom tour that May using popular seniors as brand ambassadors, and by June 2026 had moved to 18-plus events and opened a New York lane with afterparties for Playboi Carti and Don Toliver.

He told an LA interview publication in June 2026 that MyPlots had passed $3 million in revenue, one million registered users, and 150,000 monthly actives. He framed the company as owning both sides: the events themselves at 2,500-capacity venues, and the platform earning processing fees at scale.

Competitors arrived on schedule. Partiful, founded in 2020 by two former Palantir employees and backed with $27 million including Andreessen Horowitz money, launched paid ticketing on June 2, 2026, its first monetization product in six years. Luma publishes a 5% fee on its free plan and zero on Luma Plus. Eventbrite, taken private by Bending Spoons for roughly $500 million in March 2026, charges US organizers 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket in service fees and 2.9% for processing.

MyPlots charges 20% flat and, by the reporter’s own assessment, ships a product that feels amateur next to Partiful.

The Plan

Schwartz is looking for angel investors to put in $10 million. The stated uses: a permanent office, a sales team to book talent, and a 10,000-person festival on Santa Monica beach next summer. He has paused an economics degree at UCLA. He has also said he wants to sell the company eventually and start something in AI.

Read the use of proceeds carefully. A platform raising $10 million hires engineers and closes the product gap against Partiful. A promoter raising $10 million pays artist deposits, venue holds, and production. Every line Schwartz named belongs to the second business.

That distinction decides the price. At a stated $3 million of revenue, software comparables in the 8x to 12x range value the company somewhere between $24 million and $36 million. Live events promotion trades nowhere near that, because the revenue is event-dependent, working-capital hungry, and does not recur. The angels are being asked to buy the software multiple and fund the promoter cost base.

The Business Model Angle

Start with the fee itself, because the number is the argument.

MyPlots charges roughly two to three times what the incumbent charges, and the gap grows with ticket price.

Eventbrite’s fixed $1.79 dominates on cheap tickets and vanishes on expensive ones, so its effective rate falls from 13.8% to 6.6% across the range. MyPlots holds 20% at every price. On the Manhattan table Schwartz was selling, his company keeps $5,500 where Eventbrite would keep $1,817.

Set that against the marketplace league table. Uber’s blended rate runs near 27%, Etsy takes about 24% of gross merchandise sales, eBay reached 13.95% in FY2025, DoorDash books 13.4%, and Whatnot’s published schedule works out near 12.5%. Research on marketplace pricing puts the sustainable band at 5% to 15% of GMV, and it earns the upper end where purchase frequency and order value are both high. Parties are annual, not weekly. MyPlots sits above the band in the category the band predicts should sit lowest.

So what does the 20% buy?

Not software. Not payments, which Stripe provides at roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 and which every competitor also has. Not marketing tooling, which Partiful ships better. The honest answers are distribution to a cohort nobody else reaches, and a payment rail that does not ask hard questions about who is on the other end.

Now compare what mature marketplaces bundle at lower rates. Airbnb’s host-side economics run 14% to 16%, and AirCover for Hosts comes with them at no extra charge: $3 million of host damage protection, $1 million of host liability insurance underwritten by Zurich, guest identity verification, and a 24-hour safety line. Airbnb also built reservation screening on machine learning for one specific purpose, which the company states plainly in its own help documentation: redirecting bookings that carry higher risk of turning into a party.

Airbnb charges less than MyPlots and spends part of it building systems to prevent the exact product MyPlots sells.

Uber runs commercial liability coverage on trips. Ticketmaster operates inside venues that hold occupancy certificates, liquor licenses and their own insurance towers. Every ticketing or hospitality marketplace charging 15% or more attaches a risk product to the fee, because the fee is partly compensation for standing behind the transaction.

MyPlots charges the highest headline rate in consumer ticketing and stands behind nothing. Schwartz says so directly.

The California statute prices the same gap at the same boundary. Civil Code section 1714(b) gives social hosts broad immunity for furnishing alcohol to adults, and California courts have held for decades that consumption, not furnishing, causes the harm. That immunity disappears for minors. Section 1714(c) and Business and Professions Code section 25602.1 both open liability where alcohol reaches someone under 21. The legislature drew the line at 21 and the carriers drew it in the same place, which is why Lemmon could describe the identical party as insurable on one side of a birthday and untouchable on the other.

MyPlots built its user base entirely on the wrong side of that line, then charged a premium rate to sit on top of it.

The venue operator WIRED interviewed said single-night event coverage ran a couple of hundred dollars. Run that against a modest event: 200 guests at $50 is a $10,000 gate, of which MyPlots keeps $2,000. The platform collects somewhere between five and ten times the cost of the one product that would make the night insurable, and supplies none of it.

That is the finding. The 20% is priced like a risk-bearing marketplace and structured like a payment processor.

The Risk

Four arguments cut against this reading, and two of them are strong.

The 20% may be gross, not net. If Stripe’s 2.9% plus $0.30 comes out of the 20% rather than sitting on top, MyPlots nets closer to 17%, and the margin is thinner than the headline. The Eventbrite comparison still holds, because that column is also all-in. But 17% net on a business with no product moat is a different investment than 20% gross.

Distribution is a real product and might be worth the price. A 30-year-old promoter told WIRED that Partiful dominated LA event promotion until about a year ago, when MyPlots took over. If the app reliably fills rooms, 20% for demand generation beats paying street teams and buying ads. Ticketmaster’s all-in fees on a concert routinely clear 20% of face value and nobody calls that a risk premium. This is the steelman: MyPlots sells attendance, and attendance is the scarcest input in live events.

The Section 230 posture may hold. Ticketing platforms have generally not been held liable for what happens at events they sold tickets to. Schwartz’s position is legally coherent rather than a dodge. The counter is that the argument has been tested against neutral intermediaries, and a platform whose founder DJs headline slots at events on his own app, whose marketing team recruits high school brand ambassadors, and which runs an after-prom tour under its own brand may find that intermediary framing harder to hold than a pure ticketing utility would.

The 18-plus pivot may already be the fix. Schwartz moved to of-age events by June 2026 and expanded east. If the underage cohort is being shed on purpose, this analysis describes the company’s past. The problem with that defense is the app itself: WIRED’s mid-July 2026 scan found an event that did not specify any age restriction, and a mansion party carrying a disclaimer that organizers accept no liability for anything negative before, during or after.

The falsification condition is clean. If MyPlots closes a priced round with a named institutional lead and ships bundled event coverage, the central claim here weakens. Watch for a fee schedule that separates a service fee from a protection fee, which is how Airbnb, Uber and every marketplace before them converted a risk premium into a product.

Quick Questions

Is 20% the highest take rate in ticketing? Among consumer platforms, yes. Luma publishes 5% on its free plan. Eventbrite runs 6.6% to 13.8% depending on ticket price. Partiful does not publish a rate, and comparison data puts it near 10% plus $2 per ticket.

Does the take rate include payment processing? MyPlots has not published a fee schedule. If processing sits inside the 20%, the net take is closer to 17%. If it sits on top, buyers are paying more than 20% all-in.

Why does Eventbrite’s effective rate fall as prices rise? The $1.79 per ticket is fixed. On a $25 ticket that fixed piece is 7.2 points of the total. On a $500 ticket it is 0.4 points. Percentage-plus-fixed pricing always taxes small transactions hardest.

What is MyPlots worth? Nobody outside the company knows. The only public figures come from founder interviews: over $3 million of revenue, one million registered users, 150,000 monthly actives. No round has been announced at a disclosed valuation.

Who carries the liability at these events? The insurance broker WIRED consulted described it as a pile-on covering the promoter, the tenant, the property owner, whoever supplied alcohol, and the parents of an underage organizer. He also noted that minors generally cannot be held to contracts, which gives a carrier grounds to argue a policy was never valid.

The Business Model Analyst Take

MyPlots found a real gap. Getting paid for a party used to mean Venmo, Zelle and a shoebox, and Schwartz fixed that before anyone else bothered. He also built distribution to a cohort that no incumbent could reach, using tools that cost nothing: Instagram, Snap, and being the person everyone at school already knew. That combination earned him a business and it is why promoters left Partiful for him.

The pricing is where it goes wrong. Twenty percent is a rate that marketplaces charge when they absorb something for the seller, whether that is fraud loss, damage, injury claims or regulatory exposure. Airbnb reached 14% to 16% and attached $1 million of liability cover plus an anti-party model. MyPlots reached 20% and attached a disclaimer.

That works while nothing goes wrong. It stops working the first time a plaintiff’s lawyer in a sue-happy county reads a complaint and sees a platform that took a cut of every ticket, ran its own after-prom tour, put its founder on the flyer as the headline DJ, and hired high school students to sell the room. The intermediary defense assumes the intermediary stayed out of the event. Schwartz did not stay out of the event. He was working the door.

The $10 million round makes the tension explicit. Angels are being offered a software story and asked to fund a promoter’s cost base, in a category where the incumbent just added the missing feature at half the price. The distribution advantage sits in one founder’s personal brand inside one age bracket in one city, and that bracket empties every four years. Schwartz aged out of it himself in seventeen months.

The advice for anyone building a marketplace in a regulated physical category is short. Price the risk or transfer it, but do not collect for it and then disclaim it. That is the position with the worst payoff distribution available: capped upside at 20% of a gate, and a downside set by a jury.