What Has Been Built So FarThe live product surface, verifiable today
Executive summary
GigXchange is a shipped, production marketplace, not a deck: booking workflow with digital contracts and protected payment, messaging, verified reviews, native iOS and Android apps, the monthly GX Index, three national directories and a free-tools suite — all live and verifiable today.
Try it without an account: the venue directory, GX Index and free tools are public.
The marketplace core
- Profiles and discovery — public, searchable profiles for artists and venues with genre, location, media, availability and review history; press-kit (EPK) pages for artists; Smart Match recommendations and side-by-side profile comparison.
- Gig board — venues, promoters and organisers post dates; artists browse and apply.
- Booking workflow — a full state machine from enquiry to completion, handling offers, counter-offers, declines and cancellations, with an emergency-cover flow that re-lists a slot if an act cancels (Gig Rescue).
- Digital contracts — generated on every booking, signed by both parties.
- Protected payment — funds held via Stripe and released on completion; invoicing built in.
- Messaging and reviews — real-time chat per conversation, and two-way reviews that only verified, completed bookings can create.
The end-to-end flow is described in the marketplace overview and publicly on how it works.
The data products
- GX Index — the UK's only published dataset on what grassroots gigs actually pay, built from thousands of observed fee data points and refreshed monthly, with a public methodology and open reports.
- Venue directory — thousands of UK venues that book live music, each with its own public page, verified on a rolling cycle.
- Open mic directory — over a thousand verified open mic nights nationwide.
- Gig directory — a continuously refreshed national listing of upcoming live music.
Why these compound into a moat: Defensibility.
Distribution surfaces
- Native apps — iOS and Android, updated continuously.
- Free tools — invoice generator, gig rate calculator, stage plot maker, setlist builder, booking contract generator, compliance checkers and more; free, no signup, each an acquisition surface.
- Content and SEO corpus — 100+ published articles on the blog, city and genre hub pages, and open datasets — built for both search engines and AI research agents.
Engineering posture
The stack is deliberately boring and lean — SvelteKit, PostgreSQL (Supabase), Cloudflare Workers, Stripe — with an explicit engineering policy that robustness and simplicity outrank breadth. Development is AI-assisted and founder-driven, which is a large part of why this surface area was shipped capital-efficiently; the wider argument is made in Why now.
Frequently Asked Questions
A live marketplace (profiles, search, gig board), a structured booking workflow with digital contracts and Stripe-protected payment, real-time messaging, verified two-way reviews, native iOS and Android apps, the GX Index gig-pay dataset, national venue / open mic / gig directories, and a suite of free tools for artists and venues.
A production system with real members, real bookings and real payments, live at gigxchange.app and on both app stores. Shipped changes are recorded publicly on the release notes page.
A deliberately lean architecture (SvelteKit, Supabase/PostgreSQL, Cloudflare, Stripe) and an AI-assisted development workflow driven by the founder. The build philosophy — robust and lean over broad and fragile — is applied as an explicit engineering policy.
Yes — free native apps on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, plus an installable web app. One account syncs profile, bookings, messages, contracts and payments across web, iOS and Android.
A suite of free, no-signup tools that double as acquisition surfaces: gig rate calculator, invoice generator, booking contract generator, stage plot maker, setlist builder, gig flyer maker, tour poster maker, EPK builder, licensing checker, venue compliance checklist and a Martyn’s Law readiness checker, among others.
The GX Index (monthly UK gig-pay dataset with public methodology), a national venue directory, an open mic directory and a gig directory. Several are also released as open datasets under CC BY 4.0, including on HuggingFace with permanent identifiers.
Yes. Smart Match recommends best-fit artists to venues, promoters and organisers — and best-fit venues to artists — and sits alongside Explore search, the live music map and side-by-side profile comparison as the discovery layer.
