Charging the Entry Fee on Acceptance

Most calls charge the entry fee at the moment an artist submits. You can instead defer it: artists apply for free, and only the artists you accept are asked to pay, with the request arriving inside their acceptance notice.

This suits calls where the fee is really a participation cost rather than a screening cost. A market stall fee, a hanging fee, a booth charge. It also lifts the barrier on an open call where you would rather see everyone's work first and take money from the few you choose.

The setting lives at Admin → Calls → your call → Edit → Setup → Fees, and on the Fee step of the create wizard.

Turning it on

Set the call to Paid and enter the fee. Under When do artists pay? choose:

Only if accepted (free to apply; the acceptance email carries a pay link)

The alternative, and the default, is When they submit (entries are not complete until paid).

What it requires

Deferring the fee only works on a straightforward, single-price call. If the option is greyed out, the call is using something incompatible, and the reason appears underneath:

Fee on acceptance supports only a fixed flat fee on a non-rolling call with manual decisions.

In practice that rules out early-bird pricing, late fees, member discounts, sliding-scale pricing, per-submission and tiered fee models, and rolling calls. Turn those off and the option becomes available again. If you had already chosen deferred payment and then added one of them, the call quietly moves back to charging at submission and tells you so.

The choice is also fixed on private calls, and it locks for everyone once the first submission arrives, because by then the amount has been quoted to a real artist. The section says This call has entries, so the fee configuration is locked.

What artists see

At submission time, nothing to pay. The form tells them the amount and that it is due only if you are accepted. Nothing to pay now, and the public call page shows the fee as Due only if accepted. Their submission is complete the moment they send it.

When you accept them, the fee arrives with the good news. There is no separate invoice email. The acceptance notice carries the amount and a payment link, and if your own template does not include one, a short block is added to the bottom with a Pay your entry fee button. The link opens a secure payment page for that one submission.

If the fee for a particular submission works out to nothing, no link is sent and the submission is simply marked as owing nothing.