It can’t be all party all the time. Eventually, somebody’s got to pay the piper.
That looks to be the case for Partiful, the popular social events platform that people use to plan parties big and small. On Tuesday, Partiful announced its first major monetization plan in its six-year history: tickets that attendees can buy directly on Partiful.
Collecting payment for tickets wasn’t something the platform offered before; instead, hosts who used Partiful to plan paid events could include links that took guests off the platform to process ticket purchases elsewhere. The app will now let hosts of paid events handle the ticket-selling process directly in the app. That means processing different ticket tiers, setting capacity limits, handling payments, and verifying ticket QR codes at entry points when people show up for events. In return, Partiful gets a cut of the sales, which the host can either factor into pricing or pass on to the buyer as a fee.
Partiful CEO Shreya Murthy says that putting ticketing directly in Partiful was a way to remove some of the friction that event hosts experience when trying to get people to pay for tickets.
“We built this not because we felt the need to monetize; we really built it in response to a problem that hosts were facing,” Murthy says. “This is the first big monetization feature that we've had on the platform, and it won't be the last.”
Courtesy of Partiful
Partiful was founded in 2020 by Murthy and Joy Tao, both former Palantir employees. The service really took off in the post-pandemic heyday around 2021, when people were struck with a renewed interest in going out into society. Things really panned out for Partiful in 2024, when it was the hub of invites for a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest.
Partiful has been a free service since the beginning, buoyed by $27 million of venture capital funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz. It has leveraged that to build out a platform that lets millions of users send out invites to birthday parties, block parties, trinket trades, and local city events.
On its website, a page aptly titled “How do you make money?” Partiful says its “core product is free, and always will be,” but that it will begin introducing new features that users will have the option to pay for. Tickets are the start of that. They’re also the start of what feels like a new era for Partiful, as this move seems to run counter to what the company has said about its plans before.
“Partiful will not make money. There is no pitch at scale,” Partiful once posted via tweet in 2023, adding, “Investors gave us money to help u party, and that is what we are here to do. Enjoy it babes.”
In a call with WIRED, Murthy said the tweet was always meant to be a joke.
“It's kind of funny how many people took it literally, and now it's followed us around everywhere, and it's become a meme,” Murthy said. “But it is nice to say that Partiful is monetizing now.”
Courtesy of Partiful
Partiful has done well partly due to its ability to channel a kind of public whimsy and weirdness people are looking to partake in. Just a cursory glance through a list of events in the Bay Area shows events like “Open Paint Night,” “Capture the Flag,” and “Bean-Up.” (The description reads, “Do you love beans?” 42 people say they are going at the time of writing.) The service has its detractors, but it has proved very popular for people looking to arrange quick get-togethers or off-kilter social experiments.
Partiful couldn’t have coasted along on good vibes alone forever. Especially when it faces challengers like Facebook Events, Apple Invites, or the hot new invite app, Luma. But the move to build out a financial future is likely to make users nervous. Enshittification is en vogue, after all, and users have seen service after service get bogged down by growth-driven monetization machinations that eventually bloat the experience and alienate its users.
“I would contend that with the launch of ticketing, this is an act of unshittification,” Murthy says. “The experience today is janky for hosts, and it's janky for guests. That process that people were already going through is now streamlined directly in Partiful.”
Murthy says she wants Partiful to focus on smaller, community-oriented events, rather than take direct aim at ticket behemoths like AXS or Ticketmaster that run ticket sales for larger events. The immediate plan isn’t to become a platform that sells Taylor Swift Eras tour tickets, though when asked if that’s the goal, Murthy is not not down.
“Look, if Taylor Swift reads this article, please print that I would love for her to have her concert on Partiful,” Murthy says. “She can have her people contact my people.”
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