How it was built
We surveyed fifteen platforms before writing a line.
Every capability on this site began as a specified row in a catalogue, went through a design decision with the reasoning written down, and carries a test that names it. Ask about any sentence on this site and you get the decision behind it.
- Capabilities catalogued
- 1,500+
- Modules
- 29
- Platforms surveyed first
- 15
- In the exhibit hall alone
- 117
The survey
Fifteen platforms, read feature by feature.
Cvent, Swoogo, Stova, Bizzabo, EventsAir, RegFox, Eventtia, Eventscribe, Dryfta, X-CD, Momentive, RSVPify, YourMembership, EventHex and Blackthorn. We recorded what each one does, what it charges for, and where organizers work around it.
Seven capabilities nobody else shipped
Processor choice, ACH on booth invoices, card-present terminals, a live-roster credential, one shared attendance record, leads that resolve to a registration, and seven admission outcomes at the door.
Five meters, all removed
Per registrant, per event, per seat, per scanner, per module. We modelled all five and priced the whole platform as one flat annual band instead.
Both booth-selling models
Self-serve checkout and priority-points selection are sold by different vendors. An established show needs both in the same year, so both run over one inventory here.
Depth
117 exhibit-hall capabilities. Seven admission outcomes. Two processors.
Three places where the catalogue can be counted rather than described.
117
capabilities in the exhibit hall
Builder, selection windows, holds, contracts, moves that carry the money, zones, placements, the exhibitor portal, onsite rebooking. More than the leading floor-plan specialist publishes across all four of its product pages.
Exhibit hall →7
admission outcomes at the door
Where the market ships two. They are evaluated in a fixed order, and each one tells the volunteer what to do next in plain words on the screen.
The seven →2
processors, one interface
Stripe and CardPointe, built against the same interface at the same time and exercised by the same test suite. Building both at once is what proves the boundary is real.
Payments →The engineering
Eight rules the whole platform is held to.
The decisions that get expensive to change later, made first. These are the answers to what a technical evaluator asks about.
A database per customer
At every band. The commonest multi-tenant failure is a query that forgets its tenant filter, and here the other tenant's rows are not in the database to find.
Isolation proved on real Postgres
Through the same routing the application uses. An isolation test that stubs the connection is a test of the stub.
Offline works everywhere it matters
One shared offline core under the door and the booth. Six of the seven outcomes resolve with no signal at all.
Money is integer cents
Everywhere, with no floating point near a financial column. Boring, and the reason the totals reconcile.
Replay never doubles
A retried charge charges once, a replayed webhook credits once, and a queue of unsent scans replayed twice is still one admission.
The interface is an API client
Every action a screen takes is an endpoint you also have. Nothing in the product reaches data through a private path.
WCAG 2.2 AA on the public form
Built in rather than retrofitted, on the most public thing you own — and on the staff app, where a badly lit hall makes it operational.
Every claim traces to a document
Nothing on this site was written for the site. Ask about any sentence and you get the specification and the decision behind it.
Who you deal with
You deal with the person who built it.
Everything above was built by the person who will answer your email.
“Can it do X” gets answered, not ticketed
By the engineer, in the same conversation, with the catalogue row open in front of them.
Your requirements shape the order of work
Ask for something and it gets built, rather than added to a queue behind five hundred other customers.
Requests get built, not queued
A ten-year-old platform carries ten years of compromises made for somebody else's show. This one carries none of them.
One price, quoted straight
No SDR, no discovery deck, no three calls before a number. Tell us your annual registration volume and you get one.
Name a capability and we will show you it working.
The selection day, the door queue, the CRM hand-off, the board report. Name the one your current platform makes hard and we will demonstrate that, not a tour of everything else.
hello@fieravents.com