Questions & answers
Everything buyers, integrators, and event operators ask us: business first, technical below.
Business
How is Seatmap priced?
Licensed, flat pricing: never per-seat or per-ticket fees. A 300-seat hall and a 30,000-seat bowl run on the same terms. Three models: platform cloud, self-hosted enterprise, or a developer bundle (Cloud SDK / licensed Canvas). Detailed tiers publish when billing launches; request a demo to discuss your use case today.
Do you take a cut of my ticket sales?
No. Seatmap is licensed software, not a marketplace: pricing is flat, never a percentage of sales. For checkout you can use Seatmap's own payment infrastructure or connect your own provider (e.g. Stripe with 3DS/SCA). Bringing your own is an option, not a requirement.
Who owns my attendee data?
You do. Buyer and order data lives in your workspace with full tenant isolation. Your fans never become our users. Self-hosting keeps everything in your own infrastructure.
Is there a free way to evaluate Seatmap?
Yes. Seatmap Canvas v1 is open source under MIT and has been in production since 2016. Self-host it free, forever. For the platform, request a demo and we'll walk your event model end to end.
Can I migrate from another seating-chart provider?
Yes. Recreate existing charts in Studio by drawing, importing, or tracing a floor-plan image with AI scanning (Beta); Canvas ships pluggable data parsers with Pretix supported out of the box. With no per-seat fees, the migration pays for itself.
What kinds of events can I run?
One generic model covers football fixtures, concerts, galas, cruise cabins, race tracks, and general-admission festivals, even non-seat inventory like barbershop slots or bowling lanes. Same platform, same chart tooling.
Can I mix reserved seating and general admission?
Yes. Sections, GA areas, tables, and booths coexist on one chart; buyers either pick a specific seat or book a whole GA or booth object in the same checkout.
Do you offer support and an SLA?
Every commercial plan comes with a direct line to the engineers who build the platform: Monday to Friday, and we aim to reply within one working day. Enterprise adds dedicated support; self-hosted deployments put the SLA in your hands: your infra, your SLA.
Can I white-label the map and editor?
Yes. Canvas theming covers per-state seat colors, light and dark themes, and custom seat shapes. Studio embedding is fully white-label: every panel and tool is flaggable, with around 40 typed host events and capability presets.
When is the platform generally available?
Canvas v1 is open source today; the commercial platform's public release is planned for Q3 2026, with self-serve billing and transparent pricing tiers right after. The roadmap page tracks it live.
Technical
How long does integration take?
An afternoon, typically. The Cloud SDK is deliberately tiny: createSession() on your server, mountSeatmapEmbed() in the browser, and signed session.held / session.released webhooks back to you.
Which frameworks are supported?
React, Vue 3, Next.js (App Router, RSC + ISR), Angular, and vanilla JS, plus plain script and iframe embeds. Ships as ESM + CJS with TypeScript types and zero runtime dependencies.
How many seats can the map handle?
The SVG renderer is optimal under 5,000 seats (recommended maximum around 10,000), and block-based strategies scale much further. The demo stadium renders 65,000 seats. Canvas Next, our WebGL2 renderer, is built for the very largest venues.
How do you prevent double bookings?
Real-time holds: a seat locks the moment a buyer selects it, with per-seat or per-cart TTL from 60 seconds to one hour (5 minutes by default), frozen during payment. No overselling under load.
What happens during a high-demand onsale?
Enterprise onsale readiness: capacity online in about three seconds, a raffle-style pre-sale queue, a bot checkpoint, hot-event routing, deploys during onsale, and payment-provider failover.
Can we self-host? What are the requirements?
Docker Compose for evaluation; Kubernetes via Helm or a Cloudflare-native stack for production. Postgres and Redis underneath, air-gapped licensing via an environment variable, and zero-downtime upgrades.
Is Seatmap secure and GDPR-friendly?
Row-level tenant isolation, an append-only workspace audit log from day one, SAML SSO / OIDC / SCIM, MFA (TOTP, SMS, email), HMAC-signed webhooks, and vaulted provider credentials with envelope encryption. Self-hosting gives you full data residency for GDPR and on-prem compliance.
How is accessibility handled?
Wheelchair spaces, companion seats, and restricted-view seats are typed flags in Studio, not visual hacks, so buyers can filter for them and your box office can report on them.
Which payment and infrastructure providers are integrated?
Seatmap ships its own payment infrastructure with currency- and country-based routing rules and provider failover, or you can plug in your own: Stripe (Payment Element, 3DS/SCA, manual capture, refunds) plus offline and box-office payments. Beyond payments: Resend for email, Twilio for SMS/MFA, S3/MinIO/R2 storage, OpenAI and Anthropic, generic OIDC (Okta, Entra, Keycloak, Auth0), and SAML 2.0. PIX, iDEAL, and UPI are on the roadmap.
Is there a full API?
Yes: an OpenAPI 3.1 API covering venues, events, inventory overrides, pricing, orders and refunds, campaigns, members, webhooks, and cloud sessions. Signed webhooks include retries and a full delivery history.
Still have questions? Talk to our team.
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