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 locks 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.

When the fee actually becomes due

The trigger is the acceptance decision being sent, not the decision being recorded. Until the acceptance email goes out, the submission shows the fee as owed but not yet requested, and there is no live link for the artist to use.

If your call has jurying turned off, the acceptance email is the Work Included notice rather than Submission Accepted, and it carries the payment request in exactly the same way.

You can watch this on the submission itself. Open Admin → Calls → your call → Submissions → a submission and look at the Fee row, which reads one of:

Due if accepted, meaning no decision yet
Due, not yet requested, meaning accepted but the notice has not gone out
Requested; link expires with a date
Paid with a date, Waived, or Refunded

Managing the fee on one submission

On a deferred-fee call, the submission page carries three actions for owners and admins, each with an optional internal reason you can record:

Comp fee waives it. The submission stays accepted and owes nothing, and any link you already sent stops working. Use it when your organization is covering the cost. Available while the fee is owed or requested.

Revoke request cancels the request without waiving the fee. The link you sent dies immediately, the money is still owed, and you can send a fresh link afterwards. Use it when the request went out wrong.

Refund fee returns a fee that has already been paid, in full, to the artist's original payment method. It moves real money and can take several days to appear on their statement. The submission stays accepted.

To send or replace the payment link, use Send Payment Link, which reads Resend Payment Link once a live link exists. Sending a new link always kills the previous one, so the artist has to use the newest email.

One thing you cannot do is change the amount for a single artist. The fee is set on the call, and it is frozen once submissions exist. If one artist should pay something different, comp their fee and invoice them separately.

An artist who never finished paying

This is the opposite situation, and it happens on ordinary calls that charge at submission. An artist starts the payment, abandons the checkout, and their work sits unfinished. Their submission never reaches you as a real entry.

Open that submission and you have two ways to rescue it:

Comp Entry Fee waives the fee and moves the submission straight through to submitted, so it joins the jury pool like any paid one. No payment is recorded and your financial reports stay accurate. The artist gets the usual confirmation email.
Send Payment Link emails them a fresh checkout link so they can finish. Once they pay, the submission moves through on its own.

Both are available to owners and admins on a submission still sitting in draft or awaiting payment.

Before you rely on it

A call that charges a fee, whenever it charges it, cannot go live until your organization's Stripe account can receive the money. Set that up first: Connecting Stripe for Payments.