Payments & Settlement

Multi-Currency Support

Supported currencies, conversion rates, and international payment handling.

4 min readUpdated 2025-01-11

When you set up ticketing for a retreat, kirtan evening, or festival that draws people from more than one country, one of the first decisions you make is what currency the event runs on. BrightStar handles this through Stripe, the payment processor underneath every card charge and payout on the platform. This guide walks through which currencies are available, how you set one for an event, what happens to a price as it moves through conversion, and why the currency you choose can't be swapped out later. Whether you're pricing a weekend sound healing retreat for a mostly local crowd or a multi-day festival pulling attendees from several continents, the same underlying system applies — you're just deciding how to use it.

Which currencies does BrightStar support?

BrightStar supports more than 135 currencies through Stripe, including the ones you'd expect to see most often — USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, JPY, and CHF — alongside more than 130 others. Stripe maintains the authoritative list, so if you're wondering whether a specific currency is covered, stripe.com/docs/currencies is the place to check rather than guessing from this guide.

Selling in a currency is different from being paid out in one, though. BrightStar can accept payment in any of the 135+ supported currencies, but payouts only land in your Stripe account as USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, or AUD. If you sell tickets in a currency outside that shorter list, the funds are converted into whichever of the five your Stripe account is set to receive. This split exists because settlement has to happen in a currency your payout setup can actually receive, so BrightStar narrows a wide list of sale currencies down to a small, dependable set of payout currencies.

How do you set the currency for an event?

Currency is set once, per event, inside the event editor — before you publish or open sales:

1Create or edit the event you're setting up.
2Navigate to the Tickets section of that event.
3Select the currency you want from the dropdown menu.
4All ticket prices for the event will be entered and shown in that currency.
5Buyers outside your currency's region will still see prices converted to their own currency at checkout.
6Know that once a single ticket has sold, this currency is locked in for the event.

What happens to your money between checkout and payout?

Three different currencies can be in play for a single ticket sale, and it helps to know which is which. First, the display currency: BrightStar shows the buyer a price in whatever currency it detects for them, converted at a real-time rate from Stripe. Second, the charge currency: the actual charge that hits the buyer's card is made in the currency you set for the event, not the display currency — and the buyer's own bank may add its own conversion on top of that, separate from anything BrightStar or Stripe does. Third, the settlement currency: when it's time for your payout, the money lands in your Stripe account's currency, which is one of USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, or AUD. If the charge currency and your settlement currency don't match, Stripe applies a conversion fee of roughly 1% to make that conversion. Understanding these three points — what the buyer sees, what they're actually charged, and what you're actually paid — explains why the number on a buyer's bank statement can differ slightly from both the sticker price they saw and the amount that eventually reaches your account.

Why can't you change an event's currency after the first sale?

Once a single ticket has sold, BrightStar locks the event's currency and won't let you switch it, even though prices themselves stay editable for future sales. The reason comes down to what a ticket actually is: a record of what someone paid, in the currency they paid it in. If you changed the event's currency after the fact, every earlier order would be misread against a currency it was never actually charged in — refunds, reporting, and payout totals would all be reading numbers that no longer mean what they originally meant. So the lock isn't there to slow you down at setup; it's there to protect the integrity of orders that already happened. Practically, this means the moment matters: choose your currency deliberately during setup, before you open the door on sales, whether that's a kirtan evening with a handful of tickets or a festival gate processing hundreds. Before that first sale, you're free to go back into the Tickets section and change it as many times as you like.

If your event draws an international crowd — a retreat with attendees flying in from several countries, or a festival that markets across borders — pricing in USD or EUR tends to be the safer default, simply because those are the currencies most people recognize and can mentally convert without much effort. If your audience is mostly local, pricing in their own currency usually reads as more familiar than a foreign one, even after conversion. The right call comes down to who you expect to actually buy the ticket.

Common questions

What currencies does BrightStar support?

BrightStar supports 135+ currencies through Stripe. That includes the major ones such as USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, JPY and CHF, plus more than 130 additional currencies. The complete list is maintained by Stripe at stripe.com/docs/currencies.

Beyond the list Stripe maintains, BrightStar keeps its own per-currency fee schedule, so each currency carries its own platform fee row rather than a dollar figure converted at the moment of sale. That schedule also records each currency's decimal precision, which matters more than it sounds: zero-decimal currencies such as the yen, won, rupiah, forint and Icelandic krona are held and charged without a cents component, so amounts are never quietly multiplied by a hundred somewhere in the pipeline.

How do I set the currency for my event?

You set currency per event in BrightStar while creating or editing it. Go to the Tickets section of the event and select the currency from the dropdown, and all ticket prices for that event will then be in the currency you chose.

The wizard proposes a currency from the event's country and stores it lowercased on the event record, where it is checked against BrightStar's own currency table rather than kept as free text. From there it does more than label prices. It selects which row of the fee schedule applies when the order is priced, and every ticket sold snapshots the amount paid in that currency — which is what later reporting, payouts and refunds all read back.

Can I change my event's currency after tickets have sold?

No. In BrightStar an event's currency cannot be changed once the first sale has been made, so choose it deliberately when you set up the ticket section. Before any sale you are free to switch it in the event's Tickets section.

The lock is enforced on the server, not just by the greyed-out dropdown. When an event is saved, BrightStar re-reads its completed orders and, if any exist, keeps the currency already stored regardless of what the form submitted. The reason is that every purchased ticket records the price paid in the currency of sale, so switching it would misrepresent orders that already happened. The same first-sale check freezes who absorbs the service fee and the ticketing method, and stops capacity being set below the number already sold. Prices stay editable and apply to future sales only.

What currency do international buyers see at checkout?

Buyers see prices displayed in their detected local currency, converted at a real-time rate supplied by Stripe. The actual charge is still made in the currency you set for the event, and the buyer's own bank may apply its own conversion on top of that.

This split exists because two different systems are at work: BrightStar detects the buyer's likely currency and converts the price for display using a real-time rate from Stripe, but the actual charge always runs in the currency you set for the event. That's why a buyer's bank statement can show a slightly different number than the price they saw — their bank's own exchange rate and any fee it applies happen after BrightStar's conversion, not instead of it.

Which currencies can BrightStar pay me out in?

Payouts are made in USD, EUR, GBP, CAD or AUD. If you sell in a currency other than your settlement currency, the funds are converted to your Stripe account currency, and Stripe applies a conversion fee of roughly 1% when the charge currency differs from the settlement currency.

One distinction worth knowing: the card processing rate is keyed to the country your Stripe account is registered in, not the currency you happen to be selling in. A US-registered account pays US rates whether it takes dollars, euros or pounds, and a UK-registered account pays UK rates on the same sale. That is why two organizers running comparable events in the same currency can see different processing costs. BrightStar's own platform fee works the other way round — it is keyed to the currency, with a separate rate held for each one.

What currency should I price an international event in?

For events with an international audience, BrightStar suggests pricing in USD or EUR because those are the most widely recognised currencies. If most of your attendees are local, a local currency may serve them better, so the choice comes down to who your primary audience is.

The choice also moves the per-ticket platform fee. BrightStar's schedule holds a separate percentage and a separate flat amount for each currency rather than one dollar figure translated at checkout, and the flat component is what varies most between them. On lower-priced tickets that flat part is the larger share of what a buyer pays in fees, so it is worth comparing the two currencies' rows before you commit. On the free tier this does not arise — it is zero in every currency.

Why do some currencies on BrightStar not use decimal cents?

Currencies like the Japanese yen, Korean won, Indonesian rupiah, Hungarian forint, and Icelandic krona don't use a cents-style decimal component, and BrightStar holds and charges amounts in those currencies accordingly. Treating them like a currency with cents would multiply amounts by a hundred in error. BrightStar's currency table records this decimal precision for every supported currency so pricing and charges stay accurate.

This detail lives in the same table BrightStar uses to apply its per-currency fee schedule, so a currency's decimal handling and its fee row are checked together whenever a ticket is priced. For organizers, the practical effect is invisible day to day — you enter a price, and BrightStar handles whether that number needs a decimal point or not without any extra step on your part.

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