Every August, Edinburgh becomes the centre of the cultural universe. The Fringe is the largest arts festival on the planet — thousands of shows, hundreds of venues, a city that barely sleeps for a month. It's extraordinary. It's also, for anyone trying to actually plan a trip, a little overwhelming.

Until now, booking the Fringe meant hopping between separate venue websites, each with its own listings, its own checkout and its own booking fee. Want to see a comedy show at one venue, a piece of theatre at another and a family show at a third? That was three sites, three baskets and three sets of fees. For a festival built on discovery and spontaneity, the booking experience worked against the very thing that makes the Fringe special.

That's the problem we set out to solve. We're proud to share that we've designed and developed EdFest.com — a brand-new platform that, for the first time, brings the Fringe's leading venues together in one place.

A genuine industry first

EdFest is a collaboration between some of the festival's most important venue operators — Assembly, C ARTS, Gilded Balloon, Just the Tonic, Pleasance, Underbelly and ZOO. Between them, these venues represent a huge share of everything that happens at the Fringe each year. Getting them onto a single shared platform, with a single shared basket, is something that simply hadn't existed before.

For audiences, the difference is immediate. You can browse comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, dance, music and family shows from right across the festival, save the ones you like, and add shows from different venues to one basket — then book them all in a single transaction. Booking fees are capped at £5, compared with up to £9 on other platforms, so seeing more of the festival costs audiences less.

More than a ticketing site

We didn't want to build just another listings page. EdFest is a discovery and planning platform, and a few features sit at the heart of that.

EdFest Copilot is an AI-powered planning tool we built to take the stress out of scheduling. Tell it what you're interested in and it searches across shows, times and venues to assemble a Fringe itinerary that fits around your day — turning hours of cross-referencing into a plan in seconds.

Love the Fringe is EdFest's new membership scheme, and one of the most ambitious parts of the project. It's a complete system for distributing free tickets, exclusive offers, discounts and festival perks to members — while giving artists and venues a smart way to turn quieter performances and unsold seats into new audiences and word-of-mouth. Shows that take part qualify for 0% commission on their EdFest sales, helping keep more income within the festival.

And for the people who make the Fringe, we built a full self-service layer. Producers, performers and marketing teams can claim their own show pages, enrich them with extra copy, images, trailers, line-ups and social links, and create and manage their own ticket offers — all connecting to the venues' existing box-office systems behind the scenes.

The scale of the build

A platform like this is deceptively large. Behind the clean, fast experience audiences see is a system that has to pull thousands of shows across seven major venue operators into one consistent catalogue, handle a shared multi-venue basket and checkout, integrate with established ticketing infrastructure, power a membership and ticket-distribution scheme, run an AI planning tool, and give hundreds of shows the tools to manage their own pages — all while staying fast and reliable through the intensity of festival season, when traffic spikes and every minute counts.

On top of that sits the everyday craft: a fully responsive design that works as well on a phone in a venue queue as on a laptop at home, light and dark modes, fast image and video delivery, smart search, favourites, gifting, reviews and editorial content. Every detail was built to make a famously chaotic festival feel calm, navigable and genuinely enjoyable to plan.

Live for 2026

EdFest.com is now live ahead of the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It's a project we're enormously proud of — not just for the technical scale, but for what it stands for: a fairer, friendlier, more joined-up way to experience the world's greatest celebration of live performance, that puts more value back in the hands of the artists and venues at its heart.

Take a look at what we built at edfest.com.