Ticketing software for independent theatres.

Most ticketing platforms are built for an organiser putting on a single show then leaving. Theatres do something different: a programme spread across the year, audiences who return, members and subscribers, visiting companies with their own marketing, complimentary allocations for press and sponsors, and a box office that handles cash, card, phone bookings, and door sales every week. A typical UK studio theatre with a 120-seat house and a 40-week season moves thousands of bookings across dozens of shows, with three or four staff covering the lot. If you are publishing a 30-show season in one afternoon, the last thing you need is a platform that makes you re-set up subscriber discounts, comp holds, and concession rates on every event. Seaty was built so the season-level setup happens once.

Set up the dates, attach the rider and tech pack, and share access with the visiting company's stage manager. Their team sees only their week. Yours sees the whole season. Many touring shows visiting independent venues are amateur productions on a regional run. See the producer-side view for hosting amateur theatre companies.

Set the priority window to open four weeks before public on-sale, attach it to your Friends tier, and the member-only mailshot goes to the people who actually subscribe. The public sees normal availability when their window opens.

Front row reserved for the local critic on press night. Sponsor box held for the headline funder. A pair of seats on the side aisle for the partner organisation that runs your access scheme. Allocations like these are the difference between a theatre that gets reviewed and a theatre that does not. Seaty's seating plan supports holding individual seats off-sale, marked visibly to box office staff but invisible to the public, and converted to comp tickets or released to general sale at any point. The audit log records who held which seat and when. No critic emailing at 4pm on opening night because their seat has been sold, and a missed press allocation cannot be quietly blamed on the system.

Independent theatres sit awkwardly between two ends of the ticketing market, and both ends fail them.

Generic commercial ticketing platforms (the ones built for one-off concerts and festivals) break down the moment you try to programme a season. The same software that sells a sold-out arena gig cannot handle a 12-show studio season with a friends-of-the-theatre tier and a touring company every fourth week. They charge per-ticket fees that destroy small-venue margins, treat each show as a standalone listing, and have no concept of subscribers, visiting-company file sharing, or held press allocations. If you are publishing a 30-show season in one afternoon, generic platforms make you re-set up subscriber discounts and comp holds on every event.

Enterprise venue platforms (the ones built for 1,000-seat receiving houses) want £400 a month before they let you take a single ticket, and want a contracted training package on top. Most independent theatres cannot justify that on a 120-seat house with a programmer-and-a-half running the building. The CRM modules and contracted onboarding are aimed at organisations turning over seven figures a year, not a community studio running a 40-week season on grant funding and bar takings.

Building payments on Stripe Checkout alone does not solve it either. Stripe takes the payment. It does not know the critic needs the aisle seat in row C, that the visiting company's tech rider is shared only with their staff, or that subscriber priority opens four weeks before public sale. It cannot hold a seat while a phone booking is in progress, refund a single ticket out of a six-seat order, redeem a gift voucher against a future date, or log who released the press hold. Stripe is the payment primitive; the box office is the rest of the work.

Seaty was built for the gap. Reserved seating with a proper visual editor. Subscriber and friends-of-the-theatre tools that exist by default, not as a paid upgrade. Visiting-company file sharing scoped to the events they are in. A box office that handles phone, walk-up, and online on the same availability. Free if you take payments through your own card reader, a single per-transaction fee if you take cards online. That is the whole pricing page.

Studio venues frequently change configuration: end-on for one show, in-the-round for the next, cabaret tables for a fundraiser. Seaty's visual seating editor handles each layout as its own plan, attached to the events it applies to, with restricted-view and accessible seats marked clearly. For practical guidance see the guide on setting up a seating plan. If a particular run does not need reserved seating at all (fringe shows, work-in-progress nights, late-night cabaret), the guide on reserved versus general admission covers the trade-offs and when each makes sense. For one-off fundraisers and gala nights run by the theatre's charity arm, the guide on selling tickets for charity events covers donation prompts, Gift Aid on the order form, and table-of-ten cabaret layouts.