Stagewise — Event Management & Ticketing Platform

A professional conference organiser running 30+ annual events — ranging from 500-person workshops to 25,000-person festivals — needed a single platform to replace 7 different point solutions for ticketing, check-in, scheduling, and audience Q&A. Stagewise replaced them all, and its first stress test was a 50,000-attendee virtual summit that ran without a single incident.

• 1

  Ticket sale spikes on launch day can be 200× normal load — the checkout and payment pipeline had to auto-scale from 0 to 50K concurrent users in under 60 seconds.

• 2

  Physical event check-in with QR scanning had to work reliably on spotty venue Wi-Fi — offline-first was a hard requirement.

• 3

  Live Q&A with 50,000 viewers submitting questions simultaneously required real-time moderation and de-duplication at scale.

• 4

  Organisers needed a self-service builder — no developer should be required to set up a new event.

The ticketing checkout is built on an event-driven architecture: ticket reservations use Redis distributed locks with a 10-minute hold, preventing overselling under concurrent load. Stripe handles payment with idempotency keys so retried requests never double-charge. The check-in app is a PWA that pre-syncs the entire attendee list offline; QR scans validate locally and sync when connectivity resumes. Live Q&A is powered by WebSockets with a server-side upvote-aggregator that de-duplicates and ranks questions in real time — moderators see a triage queue, not a flood. The event builder is a drag-and-drop Next.js interface that generates a fully functional event microsite without any code.