Introducing Mainstage — The New GigXchange App, Built from ScratchReal-time messaging, a personalised dashboard, booking management, and it installs on your phone. This is the app I wished existed when I was gigging.

I started gigging in 2009. Back then, getting booked meant cold emails, Facebook messages that disappeared into the void, and scribbling fee agreements on the back of a setlist. Seventeen years later, a lot of the UK circuit still works that way. Mainstage is the app I wanted to exist every time I turned up to a gig with no contract, chased a venue for payment over WhatsApp, or lost a booking because someone forgot to reply.

The old GigXchange app was built in vanilla HTML and JavaScript. It worked. But “works” is not the same as “good”. It was slow on mobile, felt clunky, and every new feature was a fight against a codebase that was never designed to scale. So I started from zero. Mainstage is a ground-up rebuild in SvelteKit — every screen designed for mobile first, every interaction tested on real phones in real venues.

If you had the old app, your account, profile, bookings, messages, and payment history all carry over automatically — open gigxchange.app/app and you are already on Mainstage. Nothing to reinstall, nothing to migrate. If you are new, the sign-up takes two minutes. Here is everything Mainstage includes.

Install It on Your Phone

Mainstage is a progressive web app (PWA). That means you can add it to your iPhone or Android home screen and it behaves like a native app — full-screen, its own icon, no browser chrome. On Android, Chrome will prompt you to install. On iPhone, open gigxchange.app/app in Safari, tap Share, then “Add to Home Screen”.

Messages queue locally and sync when your connection returns. If you write a reply backstage with patchy signal, it sends automatically when you walk out to the car park.

Most booking platforms are either desktop-only web apps or ask you to download a 200 MB native app. Mainstage is under 5 MB on first install, updates itself in the background, and runs on any device with a modern browser.

Dashboard — Everything That Matters in One Screen

When you open Mainstage, the dashboard greets you by name and shows you what happened since your last visit. It is split into clear sections: your activity stats (bookings this month, total earnings, reviews, average rating), your network stats, recommended venues based on your genre and location, a community feedback board where users vote on what gets built next, and a recent activity feed.

The dashboard is not a generic landing page. It is personalised to your role. An artist sees upcoming gigs and earnings. A venue sees incoming booking requests and open slots. An agent sees roster activity and commission totals. Everyone gets what they need without digging through menus.

Below the stats, a “What’s New” feed keeps you informed of the latest features and updates. I ship changes every week, and the feed makes sure you actually know about them instead of discovering a new button six months later by accident.

Explore — Find the Right Act or Venue, Fast

The Explore page is where discovery happens. Search by name, city, or genre. Filter by fee range, availability, rating, and distance. Results load instantly as you type, with artist cards showing photo, genre tags, location, star rating, and a quick-view button.

The “For You” feed sits at the top of Explore and shows personalised recommendations. If you are an artist, it surfaces venues in your area that are actively booking your genre. If you are a venue, it shows artists who match your programming and budget. The matching runs on your profile data, booking history, and browsing patterns — not a popularity contest.

City filters let you jump between London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Brighton, Sheffield, Nottingham, Newcastle, and every other city in the directory. If you are touring and want to pick up gigs along the route, Explore is where you start. For broader research, the public Profiles page and Gig Directory are available without logging in.

Messaging — Real-Time Chat with Booking Offers Inline

Mainstage messaging is a full real-time chat system. Not a contact form. Not “we will email them and hope they reply”. Actual chat with typing indicators, read receipts, emoji reactions, reply threads, pinned messages, and file sharing.

The standout feature: booking offers are sent and accepted directly inside a conversation. You are chatting with a venue about a Saturday night slot, you agree on £350 for a 2-hour set, and instead of switching to a separate booking form, you send a booking offer right there in the thread. The venue accepts it in one tap. The booking is created, both parties get a confirmation, and the conversation is the paper trail.

If you write a reply backstage with patchy signal, it queues locally and sends automatically when your connection returns. No more “sorry, I thought I sent that”.

For venues that handle a high volume of enquiries, read receipts tell you exactly who has seen your message and who has not. No more chasing. If they have read it and not replied, that is a signal. If they have not read it, give it time.

Booking Management — Calendar, Gigs, Flyers, Tour Posters

The bookings section handles the full lifecycle of a gig — from posting an open slot to generating a tour poster after you have played it.

The availability calendar uses a 4-state system: available, busy, maybe, and unavailable. Venues and agents see your calendar when they view your profile, so they know instantly whether to reach out for a given date. No more “are you free on the 14th?” emails. If you are a dep (stand-in) musician, marking yourself as “maybe” for tentative holds is built in. For tips on managing cancellations and what your contract should say, see our cancellations guide.

You can create bookings directly, post gigs to the Gig Directory, and view all your upcoming gigs in a single timeline. Each booking card shows the venue, date, time, fee, set length, and status (pending, confirmed, completed, cancelled). For details on what belongs in a proper booking agreement, see our gig contract guide.

The flyer builder generates event graphics from your booking data — artist name, venue, date, time, and your profile photo composed into a shareable image. The tour poster takes multiple upcoming dates and lays them out in a classic tour-date format. Both export as images you can drop straight into Instagram or print for the venue noticeboard.

Profile Pages — Your Online Press Kit

Profiles in Mainstage are designed to replace the one-sheet PDF that most artists email to venues. Your profile page includes a media lightbox (photos, videos, audio clips), a setlist builder, a downloadable promo kit, fan management, a full review section, and links to your social channels.

Review cards use gradient borders and SVG star ratings that match the rest of the design language — frosted glass backgrounds, breathing glow animations, and the ice-to-violet gradient that runs through every surface. Reviews are genuine: each one is tied to a completed booking, so the star rating reflects actual working relationships rather than mates leaving five stars. If you get a bad one, read our response guide before replying.

For agents, the roster view shows all managed artists in one place. For more on roster management, see our agent roster guide. Each card displays the artist’s rating, booking count, and earnings. Manage bios, photos, and availability for your entire roster without logging into separate accounts.

The public-facing version of your profile is already visible at gigxchange.app/profiles — searchable, filterable, and embeddable. The in-app profile adds private stats, management tools, and the promo kit builder that the public page does not include.

Payments — Invoices, Payouts, Stripe Integration

Payments in Mainstage are built on Stripe. Artists receive payouts directly to their bank account after a completed booking. Venues pay through the platform with card or bank transfer. Every transaction generates an invoice that both parties can download.

The payment dashboard shows your payout history, pending amounts, and a running total of lifetime earnings. For artists, this is your income tracker. For venues, this is your spend tracker. For agents, commission is calculated automatically and shown per booking and in aggregate.

We chose Stripe because it handles SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) for UK and EU payments, supports instant payouts, and has a track record that means your money is not sitting in a startup’s bank account. For more on how musicians get paid in the UK, read our guide to getting paid.

Creator Tools, Insights, and Settings

Creator Tools

Creator Tools is an in-app collection of platform tools with “Try It” buttons and animated modals that explain what each tool does. The Rate Calculator benchmarks your fee against the GX Index. The Setlist Builder plans your set with drag-and-drop reordering. The Booking Contract Generator produces a professional gig contract in under a minute. All three are also available free on the public site at gigxchange.app/free-tools.

Insights Dashboard

Insights gives you performance analytics for your profile and bookings. Track how many people viewed your profile, where they came from, how your booking rate compares to your enquiry rate, and how your earnings trend month over month. This is the data that tells you whether your pricing is right, whether your profile is converting, and which cities are generating the most interest.

Settings

Settings covers account management, security (including multi-factor authentication), payment methods, appearance, AI preferences, notification preferences, and community feedback.

The appearance toggle switches between dark mode and light mode instantly — no flash, no reload. Dark mode is the default (because musicians live in dark rooms), but light mode is there for outdoor festivals and daytime office work. The toggle respects your OS preference on first load and remembers your choice from there.

Notification preferences let you control exactly which alerts you receive: booking requests, messages, payment confirmations, review prompts, and platform announcements. A venue that handles 20 booking requests a week needs different settings than a solo artist who books one gig a month.

The Design — Frosted Glass, Gradient Borders, View Transitions

Every surface in Mainstage uses the same design language: frosted glass backgrounds, gradient borders that shift from ice blue to violet, and a breathing glow animation on cards that stops when you hover. It is a dark-first interface built for the lighting conditions musicians actually work in — dim backstage areas, dark stage wings, pub corners with one working lamp.

Pages transition with a smooth crossfade and heading slide. Every URL is shareable and the back button always works — no weird routing behaviour.

On mobile, long-press context menus surface quick actions on cards — message, book, favourite, share — without navigating away from the page. Haptic feedback fires on key interactions (button presses, successful actions, errors) so the app feels physical rather than flat. Both features degrade gracefully on devices that do not support them.

The coachmark onboarding tour guides new users through the interface on first login. It highlights each major section — dashboard, Explore, messages, bookings, profile — with a tooltip overlay that you can dismiss at your own pace. It only runs once and never comes back unless you reset it in settings.

The layout adapts to your screen. On a phone, a bottom tab bar handles navigation. On a laptop or tablet, you get a full sidebar. The interface feels right on both without you having to think about it. Smooth transitions work in Chrome and Safari; other browsers get instant page loads with no animation.

Why SvelteKit

The old app was vanilla HTML and JavaScript. No framework, no build step, one giant HTML file with a stylesheet and 48 JavaScript modules. That was a deliberate choice at the start — zero dependencies, total control, fast to ship. But it hit a wall. Adding features meant touching a 1,700-line HTML file. State management was a tangle of DOM manipulation. Every new page was a copy-paste job that drifted from the original over time.

SvelteKit solved the problems that mattered: component isolation (110 components that do not leak into each other), file-based routing (every page is a file, not a route in a config), server-side rendering (the app loads fast even on slow connections), and built-in View Transitions. It compiles to minimal JavaScript at build time, so the app ships significantly less code than typical alternatives. And it is a joy to write in — which matters when you are one person building an entire platform.

The public website (the page you are reading now) is built in Astro. The app is SvelteKit. They share the same Supabase backend, the same Stripe integration, and the same design tokens (colours, spacing, typography). Two frameworks, one platform, each doing what it does best.

What’s Next

1. iOS App Store — Mainstage as a native-wrapped app on iOS, with push notifications and deeper system integration. The PWA works today, but an App Store listing makes it easier to find for people who have never heard of a PWA.
2. Smart Match — a recommendation engine that replaces the current “For You” feed. If a venue books jazz trios on Thursdays and you are a jazz trio available on Thursdays, you should be in their inbox automatically.
3. Backstage — a lightweight version of the app for users who want speed over features. Find acts, manage bookings, check stats — without the full dashboard.
4. Push notifications — booking requests, messages, and payment confirmations delivered to your lock screen. No more opening the app to check.

For the full roadmap including website features and content plans, see the website relaunch post.

If you missed what I shipped earlier this month, read the May 2026 platform update for free tools, 36 genre pages, 20 new guides, and the Grassroots Venue Directory. For the full backstory of why this platform exists, read what is GigXchange and why did I build it.

If you are an artist looking for gigs, a venue looking for talent, an agent managing a roster, or a promoter filling events — the app is free and takes a few minutes to set up. Sign up at gigxchange.app, build your profile, and take Mainstage for a spin.

Annual refresh commitment

This guide was published on 27 May 2026 and is refreshed every May. App features and capabilities evolve rapidly, so annual verification matters, so annual verification matters. We re-verify every reference, recommendation, and data point once a year. Next scheduled refresh: May 2027. If any claim is outdated before then, email hello@gigxchange.app and we will update it within 24 hours.