Humanitix

Humanitix: Turning Every Ticket Sale into a Force for Good

Humanitix is the world’s first profit-for-good ticketing platform, a digital-first organization that disrupts the traditional ticketing industry by redirecting 100% of profits from booking fees toward global charitable causes. Operating across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, the platform has donated over $20M AUD to partners focusing on education, global health, and extreme poverty reduction. As an entity processing significant financial transactions and personal data, Humanitix faces constant threats from cyber criminals who often target nonprofits perceived as having weaker security.

For Humanitix, its web presence is its lever to move the world. The organization’s mission is centered on the belief that every event should be a force for good. By scaling their impact over the last nine years, they have moved beyond traditional charity models to fund cutting-edge interventions like direct cash transfers in Africa, which have shown incredible results in reducing infant mortality and sparking sustainable business ideas.

"Cyber security tools are critical because they protect our ability to generate 'financial abundance' for our charitable partners. Any outage or breach directly impacts the funding for essential social programs." — Ryan O’Connell, Chief Technology Officer, Humanitix

Cloudflare Products & Impact

By joining Project Galileo, Humanitix moved from a fragmented AWS CloudFront setup to a unified, principled security architecture under Cloudflare. This transition allowed their small engineering team to focus on their mission.

Turnstile: This privacy-first, invisible CAPTCHA alternative was a game-changer for Humanitix. In instances where 95% of traffic in the checkout flow was bot-driven, Turnstile reduced it to almost zero, ensuring fair access for human users without the friction of traditional challenges.
Cloudflare Waiting Room: Essential for high-demand ticket "on-sale" events, this tool allows Humanitix to gracefully manage massive traffic surges, effectively nullifying denial-of-service (DDoS) style threats and protecting backend origin servers from crashing.
WAF (Security Rules & Rules): Humanitix uses these to deploy custom protections within minutes. For example, they successfully blocked 99% of malicious out-of-country traffic attempting to "snap up" tickets for resale during high-demand events.
Caching: Humanitix achieved an immediate 85% cache hit rate with minimal configuration. This significantly improved performance for legitimate users while decreasing server costs, allowing more money to flow to charity.

Humanitix deals with a high volume of automated traffic, processing over 1.22 billion requests monthly, with 1.2 million identified as threats. By utilizing Cloudflare’s defaults and flexible rule-setting, Humanitix can now thwart phishing, spam, and bot attacks that specifically target the nonprofit sector.

"We have a small engineering team and if not for Cloudflare, we would need to dedicate more engineers to improving the performance and security of our websites. For Humanitix, that added complexity would directly detract from our core mission. Cloudflare ensures that more time and resources can be directed toward maximising the funds we raise for charity." — Ryan O’Connell, Chief Technology Officer, Humanitix