Scope the work before you commit
Read the API, then decide
The whole integration surface is public: chart embed, availability, hold with timeout, best-available seat, book, release and general-admission capacity — with request and response examples for each. You can size the migration from the docs alone, before any sales conversation.
The viewer loads from a plain <script> tag plus a stylesheet, from the region closest to your buyers — there is no build step or framework lock-in to evaluate first. And the first 60 days of integration carry no plan or per-seat charges, so your team can build against the real API before anything is billed.
Used seat vs sold seat
A used seat is any seat whose status changes during an event: selected in the browser, held during checkout, assigned, or booked. A sold seat is only a seat that actually reaches booked status.
That sounds like a detail until you look at a real on-sale. Buyers browse. They click a seat, compare it with three others, hold two while they discuss the price, and abandon half the carts. Every one of those interactions is a billable unit under used-seat metering. None of them are under sold-seat metering.
One checkout, two invoices. A buyer opens your chart, clicks five seats while comparing views, holds two, and buys two. Used-seat billing counts five. Sold-seat billing counts two. Multiply that ratio by a high-traffic on-sale and it stops being a rounding error.
Seat Studio bills a seat at most once per event — if a booking is released and the seat sells again to someone else, it is not billed twice. Selections, holds and abandoned carts are never billed at all. The practical consequence: your seating cost tracks your ticket revenue instead of tracking your traffic.
Reasons teams move to Seat Studio
Your bill tracks revenue
Browsing, holds and abandoned carts are free. A high-traffic on-sale that converts at 20% does not cost you five times a quiet one.
Pick where your data lives
Eight AWS regions, each with its own API endpoint and viewer host. Serve buyers from the region you are legally and physically closest to, not from wherever the vendor happens to run.
We draw your charts for you
On yearly plans our team rebuilds your existing floor plans from images, PDFs or SVG — the part of a migration that usually stalls it.
Where the two differ
Public information only. The seats.io column reflects its publicly documented behaviour as of July 2026; where we are not certain, the cell says so rather than guessing. Confirm current details with each vendor before deciding.
| seats.io | Seat Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Used seat — selected, held, assigned or booked | Sold seat only |
| Selections, holds, abandoned carts | Counted as used seats | Free |
| Seat released and resold | Depends on status changes | Billed at most once per event |
| Chart creation | Visual designer | Visual designer, plus direct SVG import that converts SVG elements into event sectors, and chart scanning from floor plan images |
| 3D venue view | Not part of the core seating chart | Included |
| Front-end integration | JavaScript renderer with framework wrappers | One <script> tag plus a stylesheet, then mount() — framework-agnostic. Documented examples in plain HTML, React and PHP; no build step required |
| Regions and data residency | Cloud, vendor-selected regions | Eight AWS regions, each with its own API endpoint and viewer host — you choose which one serves your events |
| Try before you talk to sales | Free trial account | 60 days of free integration with no plan or per-seat charges, with support over email and chat |
| Booking API surface | REST API — events, holds, bookings | REST — availability, hold with timeout, release, book, cancel, status change, best-available, GA capacity, hold tokens. Full reference |
| Migration from your current provider | Self-service redraw | Our team redraws your existing floor plans — included on yearly plans |
| White label | Available | Included on every plan |
| On-premise deployment | Cloud only | Cloud only — regional endpoints rather than self-hosting |
| Published price list | Yes — check seats.io for current figures | Yes — €360 to €20,000 per month, all tiers public |
Competitor column reflects the publicly documented billing model, not a price quote. Verify current terms with seats.io directly.
When seats.io is the better call
An honest comparison has to include this. seats.io has been in the market for years, with a large installed base, a public status page, and a body of community answers you can search when something breaks at 2am. If your priority is picking the option with the longest track record and the widest pool of engineers who have already integrated it, that is a real argument and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Seat Studio is the better call when your traffic-to-conversion ratio is expensive under used-seat metering, when you want a 3D venue view or SVG-native chart creation, or when you want the migration drawn for you rather than rebuilt by your own team.
What Seat Studio costs
All plans are prepaid, in euros, and every tier is public:
- Club — €360/month, 3,000 sold seats, €0.15 per additional sold seat
- Theater — €500/month, 5,000 sold seats, €0.12 per additional
- Arena — €1,800/month, 20,000 sold seats, €0.10 per additional
- Stadium — €3,500/month, 50,000 sold seats, €0.07 per additional
- Festival — €6,000/month, 100,000 sold seats, €0.06 per additional
- Tour — €12,500/month, 250,000 sold seats, €0.05 per additional
- World Tour — €20,000/month, 500,000 sold seats, €0.04 per additional
Yearly plans take 20% off the upfront commitment — the additional-seat price is unchanged — let you spread usage across the 12 months, and include the chart drawing service. Volume above your commitment is invoiced the following month at actuals. Full details on the pricing section.
Migrating an existing integration
You are not starting from zero, and the migration cost is usually what kills the switch. Two things exist to remove it:
- We redraw your charts. On yearly prepaid plans, our team rebuilds the floor plans you use today from images, PDFs or SVG files, delivers validated sectors, rows and numbering, and reviews them with you before go-live.
- 60 days of free integration. No plan or per-seat charges while your team wires up the API, with support over email and chat.
The API surface — availability, holds with timeout, best-available seat, booking — is documented in the Partner Integration Guide, so you can scope the work before committing to anything.
Scope the migration with your AI assistant
Paste this into Claude, ChatGPT or your coding agent. It reads our integration guide and drafts the swap against your current stack.
Read https://seatstudio.io/doc-seats/ and https://seatstudio.io/llms.txt. I currently use seats.io for reserved seating and I am evaluating Seat Studio. 1. Map my existing seats.io integration onto the Seat Studio equivalents: chart embed, availability, hold with timeout, best-available seat, book, release, and general-admission capacity. 2. Flag anything in seats.io that has no direct Seat Studio equivalent. 3. Produce a working proof of concept for my stack: [describe your stack]. 4. Estimate the engineering effort in days. Note the billing difference: seats.io meters used seats (selected, held, assigned or booked); Seat Studio meters only sold seats.
Common questions
What exactly is a "sold seat"?
A seat counts as sold only when its status changes to booked through the API — either directly by your platform or via the best-available algorithm. Browser selections, holds and abandoned checkouts are never billed. A seat is billed at most once per event. Places in general admission areas, at tables and in boxes count the same way.
Does a high-traffic on-sale inflate my bill?
No. Browsing volume has no effect on what you are billed — only bookings do. The API auto-scales for on-sale spikes and that capacity is not metered separately.
Can I run both providers in parallel during migration?
Yes. The 60-day integration period is designed for exactly that: keep your current provider selling while your team builds and tests against Seat Studio, then cut over per venue or per event.
Where does the API run?
In eight AWS regions — N. California, Ohio, São Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Cape Town, Seoul and Sydney — each with its own API endpoint and viewer host, so you choose which region serves your events. Charts are delivered through Amazon CloudFront across 750+ points of presence in 100+ cities.
Is Seat Studio a drop-in replacement for seats.io?
No — they are separate products, so a migration re-points your integration rather than swapping a library. The concepts map closely, though: both embed a viewer in your page and expose a REST booking API built around events, holds and confirmations. The work is mostly re-wiring, not rethinking your checkout flow.
Can I self-host Seat Studio?
No. Seat Studio is cloud only. What we offer instead is regional choice: eight AWS regions with separate endpoints, so events can be served and kept in the region that fits your data-residency requirements. If your procurement process requires the platform to run inside your own infrastructure, neither Seat Studio nor seats.io will satisfy it.
Do I need React, Vue or a build step?
No. The viewer loads from a <script> tag and a stylesheet, then you call mount() on any DOM container — it is framework-agnostic. The integration guide ships examples in plain HTML, React and PHP.