What We Built in July 2026: Pay Through GIGXCHANGE, the iPhone App & a New-Look WebsiteThe month the money side arrived: pay for a booking with the fee held safely, the iPhone app on the App Store, and a website that shows you rather than tells you

July was the month GigXchange grew up financially: two app releases, v0.3.5 on 4 July and v0.3.6 on 27 July, with the website moving in step. The app started the month by landing on the Apple App Store and ended it with payments you can trust. The website got a new look, a page for every free tool, and a set of public resources, from a help centre to a press room, that make the platform easier to understand from the outside. As with June, we have split this roundup the way the work split: the app first, then the website.

The App: Mainstage (v0.3.5 and v0.3.6)

The Mainstage app is where artists, venues, agents and promoters run their bookings. July’s two releases gave it the thing every marketplace needs most: money that moves safely. Around that centrepiece came a fair reliability record, a public What’s On page for every venue, Gig Rescue, referrals, self-drafting invoices and a long list of polish.

Pay for a Booking, Safely, in One Place

You can now pay for a booking through GigXchange, and the money is held safely until the gig is done. Payment runs through Stripe: the performer knows the date is genuinely secured, the booker knows the money has not vanished into thin air, and it is released to the act five days after the gig date. The fee is a flat 5% on the full agreed amount, paid in two parts, a deposit at booking and the balance before the gig, and our terms now spell all of it out in language you can actually follow.

What happens when plans change is written out plainly and applied for you. Cancel well ahead of the date and the deposit comes back in full. Cancel closer to it and the deposit is split down the middle. Cancel very late and it stays with the act, who turned other work away for that date. There is a grace window if you change your mind within a day of paying, and a booking that never gets signed by both sides does not sit in limbo: it expires and the money comes back automatically. When you do cancel, you are asked why in a few taps, so the reason is on the record for both sides.

Now on the Apple App Store

The GigXchange iPhone app cleared review and went live on the Apple App Store at the start of July. It is a free download for iPhone and iPad, alongside Google Play for Android, and it is the same app with one account, so you can run your gigging life from whatever you carry. If you would rather not install anything, the web app still works in any browser. The full story is in the App Store launch post, and the Platform page shows how the pieces fit together.

Booking an Act When You Are Not in the Trade

June opened GigXchange to everyone; July made that genuinely comfortable. If you joined to book live music rather than to be booked, the app now works properly around you. You get your own notifications screen, so when an act accepts your offer you can read it and act on it. A short guided tour points at your navigation rather than a performer’s. The exact amount you will pay sits underneath the fee box before you propose it, not sprung on you at the payment screen. And your Payments tab shows your bookings and what you have spent. How booking works covers the whole journey.

Reputation You Can Rely On

An artist’s profile now shows how dependable they have been: bookings completed and bookings cancelled over a sensible recent window, sitting right beside their reviews. Crucially, it is fair. A cancellation that was not the artist’s fault, a venue pulling the date or a genuine emergency, is reviewed and does not dent the record. Reputation here should reflect how you behave, not how unlucky you have been.

The rest of the trust toolkit grew with it. Reviews earned elsewhere can be added to your profile, and the client you credit can confirm theirs with one click to earn it a Client Verified badge. You can hand-pick up to 10 acts you would vouch for, and your public profile shows them as a Recommended-by shortlist, so a booker who catches you unavailable still leaves with somewhere trusted to go. Fans and bookers can now leave comments on an artist’s profile, right beside the music, with the artist in full control of their own page. And artists with uploaded tracks get a play button straight on their card in Explore, with a live waveform, so people can audition acts while they scroll. Every play on a card counts as a real listen, the same as on your public profile.

A What’s On Page for Every Venue, and Directory Pages You Can Claim

Every venue on GigXchange now has its own public What’s On page to share: the upcoming programme with dates, times and ticket links, the regular nights, the good-to-know facts like venue type, capacity and usual hours, how to get there with a map, plus photos and recent reviews. Publish an event and the page updates by itself, so the link you share stays current.

The directory side opened up too. GigXchange runs free public pages for well over 1,000 UK venues and open mic nights, and if one of them is your venue it is now yours to claim: search for it on the new Venue Pages screen, claim it, and once our team has checked the claim by hand you keep the details fresh yourself. Not listed yet? Create your page from scratch on the same screen, pre-filled from your profile. Members can also vote for the grassroots venues they want to see join, with the most-wanted rising into a Wanted on GigXchange shortlist in the venue directory, so we know where to go knocking. Venues can now set opening times for every day of the week, and their Regular Nights and House Rules live in two separate cards they can edit one at a time.

Gig Rescue Goes Further

Gig Rescue arrived in early July for the worst moment in live music: an act dropping out with the date sold. Re-open the slot and suitable performers near you hear about it in a few taps. By the end of the month it went further. You now get a public link to share straight into your own musician WhatsApp groups and socials, so anyone can apply in a minute with no account needed. A live status view shows who you invited, who has seen it and who is in. If it goes quiet, one tap widens the search or raises the fee. And when the right musician applies, you can take them straight into a booking that is already filled in. The Gig Rescue page has the whole flow.

Your Links, Referrals and a Profile That Travels Well

A new Your Links button on your dashboard gathers every public page you have in one place. Artists see their public profile, press kit, tour dates and any stage plots they have shared; venues see their profile, What’s On page and press kit. View or copy any link in a tap, or show a scannable QR code for a poster, a flyer or the person across the bar. Pages you have not published yet point you at the tool that publishes them, so it doubles as a checklist for building your presence.

Those links now look the part when you share them. Send your profile to someone on WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, X or LinkedIn and it unfurls as a polished branded preview, your photo, name, role and genres, instead of a plain grey box. And when you share GigXchange itself, it can pay you: your account page now carries your own referral link and code. Bring a venue onto the platform and you earn £25 once they join and complete their profile; any other member you refer earns you £5.

Less Money Admin

Invoices now draft themselves. When a booking is marked completed, a draft invoice appears moments later, already filled in: the agreed fee, any deposit taken off, and a due date that follows your payment terms. Nothing goes out without you pressing send, and a switch in invoice settings turns auto-drafts off if you would rather raise every invoice yourself.

The rest of July’s money work is about seeing clearly. The new Insights view in Payments turns your bookings into a picture: how much you have spent or earned over a period, how it is trending, who you book most, and your busiest months. Supporters can tip an artist straight from their profile, with Apple Pay and Google Pay supported. And your live availability can now sit on your own website: pick a calendar or a compact strip in the Booking Manager, copy one snippet into your site editor, and visitors see your free dates and book you direct. The widget guide shows it end to end.

The Website (v0.3.5 to v0.3.6)

The public website is how people find GigXchange before they sign up. In July it stopped telling people what the platform does and started showing them: a page for every tool with the real output on it, a homepage that plays out a whole booking, and public resources anyone can quote.

Fifteen Pages, One for Every Free Tool

Every free tool now has its own home: 15 new pages, each opening with the tool doing its real job. The previews are the actual thing, real posters, flyers, press kits, invoices, stage plots and checklists made with the tool, and you can tap any of them to view it full screen. Nine pages cover the artist toolkit: the EPK Builder, tour poster maker, gig flyer maker, stage plot maker, invoice generator, fans and mailing list, gig rate calculator, AI matches and the Booking Manager, which runs the real availability widget live on the page. Six cover the venue side: the licensing checker, compliance checklist, events poster, find an artist, post a gig and Gig Rescue. The Free Tools hub opens with a wall of photo cards covering the lot.

A New Look, and a Homepage That Shows the Whole Booking

The homepage now walks you through a real booking one beat at a time: the first message, the offer, the counter, signing the contract, the money going in and being held safely, the night itself, and the payout landing. Step through it at your own pace and you can see exactly what GigXchange does at every stage, and what it costs, before you sign up for anything.

Around it, the whole site moved to one consistent style: a rail of quick links down the side, a dock of live figures under the heading, and the same card treatment throughout, from About and the blog to the directories and the rates pages. The venue directory cards were rebuilt around what you actually need before getting in touch: real opening times for all seven days, a straight tick-or-cross list of the backline and PA the room provides, and a full description instead of one chopped off mid-word. If the venue is yours, the claim link sits right on the card. The homepage also ships far smaller images, so it loads quicker and scrolls smoothly on a mid-range phone.

Ready for Martyn’s Law, Well Before the Deadline

A new venue-safety law, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act, reaches every UK venue holding 200 or more people from around 2027, and most owners have not heard of it. The new Martyn’s Law readiness check tells you whether it applies, which tier you are in, and what to have in place, then drafts your written procedures as a document you can review and sign off. Our plain-English guide covers the whole story.

The other compliance tools now remember you. The Licence Checker and Compliance Checklist save to your venue and come back on any device, the checker names your local licensing authority from your postcode and counts down key filing deadlines, and both export polished, dated PDF reports for your records. You can even try the licence checker with no account and have the verdict emailed to you as a PDF.

A Help Centre, a Press Room and Open Data

The first wave of Website the first v0.3.7 work landed as July closed, and it is all about being easy to understand from the outside. The help centre answers 29 of the questions people genuinely ask, in plain English, each paired with a real full-screen shot of the app, and the whole guide is downloadable as one properly laid-out document. The new press room holds what we are in a paragraph, the numbers behind the platform, story angles with real data behind them, and quotes free for anyone to use with a link.

And the July 2026 edition of the GX Index is out: what UK artists are actually being paid, city by city, with a wedding-band median of £1,042 and a pub-band median of £375 this issue, and the full dataset published openly for anyone to download, cite or build on. It sits alongside the Musicians’ Union national gig rates as a floor, and the rates page and reports library hold every issue.

Member Spotlight: Shiversa, and a Status Page That Tells You More

Issue 6 of Member Spotlight is out, featuring Shiversa: a proper interview with a working band about how they actually operate, delivered as a magazine-style PDF with a redesigned cover and cleaner layout this issue. And the status page now shows 90 days of uptime alongside the live checks, with a day-by-day chart per service, so you can see whether anything has been wobbling rather than just whether it is up right now. The Open Mic Finder kept growing through all of this, tracking 1,150+ nights across 120+ UK cities on a dependable re-checking cycle, beside a directory of 2,400+ grassroots venues.

What’s Next

1. Rescheduling in the app: propose a new date on a confirmed booking and have the other side accept it, without going through us. For now our team handles date moves.
2. Full agent matching: Smart Match built around how agents actually work, across their whole roster.
3. EPK Builder v2: full mobile-optimised editing and widget stability, plus richer public profiles with verified booking history and review scores.
4. Backstage preview: a first look at the next-generation app layer, with advanced analytics and intelligent tools.

If you missed what came before, read June 2026 or May 2026. The community feedback board inside the app feeds straight into this roadmap.

If you are an artist looking for gigs, a venue looking for talent, or a promoter running events, the platform is free and takes a few minutes to set up. See how booking works, then sign up at gigxchange.app and build your profile, on the web, on Google Play or on the App Store.

Annual refresh commitment

This guide was published on 2 August 2026 and is refreshed every August. Platform features and roadmap priorities evolve month to month, so annual verification matters. We re-verify every reference, recommendation, and data point once a year. Next scheduled refresh: August 2027. If any claim is outdated before then, email support@gigxchange.app and we will update it within 24 hours.