One of us has spent more than twenty years organising events in the Netherlands, and the other started out as a student doing marketing for those same events. Across two decades of clubs, festivals, and one-off shows, we have been the customer of every kind of ticketing system you can name. We have launched ticket shops that buckled under the load on launch day, paid contracts that locked us in for three years, and watched our fans pay sky-high fees to a resale site we had no relationship with.
We have exported buyer lists into Mailchimp a gazillion times. We have rebuilt the same spreadsheet ten times because the dashboard did not let us compare editions side by side, and we have been on calls with account managers who did not understand the difference between a quiet support ticket and a door problem that needs attention right now.
After more than twenty years of this, the strange part is that the core problems of running a nightlife operation still feel unsolved. The technology that powers the events industry is essentially a stack of tools built in the early 2010s by people who have never stood at a door at two in the morning. Most of the well-known platforms in our market were founded between 2008 and 2015, and the founders of some have already cashed out, which we feel in the way those platforms now treat their customers.
So we built Celebratix. We started building in 2022 with the goal of putting every part of running an event ticketing, resale, guestlist, CRM, email, WhatsApp, payments, and live insights into one system, designed by people who still organise events themselves. Below we explain the problems we lived with for twenty years, and how we are solving each of them inside Celebratix today.
The core problems of running a nightlife operation today
Talking to a few hundred organisers across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France, we hear the same five problems again and again. These are the ones the existing tools have never really fixed, and they are the ones every nightlife operator we know is still paying the price for every weekend.
The platforms you use were not built by people who run events
Walk into any club or festival office in the Netherlands and ask what they use for ticketing. You will hear three names most of the time: Weeztix, Eventix, and Paylogic.
Weeztix and Eventix are now part of the same company, Weezevent Group, after the founders sold the business.
Paylogic was acquired by See Tickets back in 2018, which itself became part of CTS Eventim in June 2024.
These platforms started life as plain ticket shops, then bolted on features one by one over a decade, and the dashboards still feel like they were designed for the 2012 web. What event organisers tell us these days is that they actually feel like the energy is gone.
When the founders of a platform cash out and a corporate group takes over, the product still works in the basic sense that tickets get sold and people walk through the door, but the team behind it is no longer rushing to fix things for you, and the people on the phone do not understand the difference between a quiet Tuesday support ticket and a Saturday night when the gate stops scanning.
Resale sends your revenue to someone else, with your fans' data
When your fan cannot attend, they list the ticket on a third-party resale site. In the Netherlands and most of Europe, that site is usually TicketSwap.
Their pricing is public: the seller pays a 5 percent service fee, the buyer pays a 7 percent service fee plus a 3 percent transaction fee, which means roughly 15 percent of the transaction lives outside your operation.
By default, you as the organiser receive nothing from that resale, even though you took the financial risk of putting the event on in the first place.
There is also the data problem. The person who bought a resold ticket is one of your hottest leads for your next event, because they wanted in badly enough to pay above face value.
When that transaction happens outside your system, you never learn who they are. Their email, phone number, and event history sit inside a third-party database that you do not control, and you cannot retarget them for the next launch.
Your tech stack is six tools that do not talk to each other
Every organiser we onboard arrives with a familiar shape of tech stack.
- Ticketing in one tool.
- Email in Mailchimp.
- A separate CRM.
- A separate guestlist app.
- A separate scanner.
- A separate resale site.
- A spreadsheet on top of all of it for the actual analysis.
Each of those tools charges its own subscription, and each integration is a fragile API connection that breaks the moment a column layout changes. You export your buyer list to push it into Mailchimp, the export is already out of date by the time it lands, and the email goes out without the latest twenty people who just bought tickets.
The guest who pre-registers is not in your CRM until someone runs an import. The customer who showed up last weekend has no profile that connects to the customer who walked in this weekend. Every connection between systems is one more place where data quietly goes wrong.
The data you need to grow lives in five different exports
Ask any nightlife operator a simple question. How many of your buyers last weekend were returning, and how many were new?
Most of the time, the honest answer is that nobody knows, because the dashboard does not split the two, and pulling the comparison together by hand takes an afternoon of CSV cleaning that nobody on the team wants to do.
The same goes for almost every decision a club or festival makes.
- How did this edition compare to the same week last year by phase, ticket type, and channel?
- What does the projected sales curve look like seven and thirty days out?
- Which Meta campaign actually drove the sales, after cookies, ad blockers, and iOS privacy changes did their work?
These are not exotic questions. They are the basic numbers a marketing team needs to push harder, adjust pricing, or move budget before it is too late, and the older platforms simply do not surface them in a way that takes less than a day of manual work.
Support disappears the moment your event goes live
There is a particular kind of silence you hear from a legacy event ticketing platform at twenty-three thirty on a Saturday night, when the gate has stopped scanning and the queue outside is growing.
It is the silence of a support ticket sitting in a queue, and a chatbot suggesting you check the help centre, and an account manager who is at home and will get back to you on Monday morning.
For an organiser, an event going wrong is not a customer service issue. It is the only thing that matters that weekend, and the platform you depend on either treats it that way or it does not.
Almost everyone we have onboarded in the past two years told us the same story about support, and almost all of them mentioned it before they mentioned price.
Enter Celebratix, the operating system for nightlife business operators
We set out to build the system we wished we had when we were running events ourselves, and to make sure that the people using it feel that the company behind it actually cares whether their Saturday night goes well. Here is how that translates into the product.
One system replaces the six tools you are paying for now
Inside Celebratix, your ticketing, resale, guestlist, CRM, email campaigns, WhatsApp campaigns, payments, and live insights all run from the same dashboard. You stop paying for a separate Mailchimp subscription, a separate CRM, a separate guestlist app, and a separate door scanner.
That is real money back in your budget every month, and on the operational side it means that your data is finally in one place. When somebody pre-registers, they are in your CRM the second they hit submit. When somebody buys a ticket, their profile updates in real time and the segment they belong to changes automatically.
Your email and WhatsApp campaigns reach the right people the moment the data changes, without you running an export at midnight to keep the audience fresh.
We put a special focus on user experience because event organisers are not software engineers. You are running a club, booking a festival, or producing a sports event, and your team is small. We built Celebratix mobile-first so you can check sales from a tour bus, a meeting, or a flight, and we built it for people who want to launch and run a weekend without a manual.
Resale that pays you back, with the rules you set
Resale inside Celebratix lives on the same infrastructure as your primary ticket sales. When a fan resells their ticket, the buyer never leaves your branded experience, the rules you set on the resale are the rules that get enforced, and the bulk of the resale fee flows back to you as the organiser.
You decide whether to cap the markup at zero percent to keep prices fair, twenty percent to allow modest flexibility, or higher if your model calls for it. You can set those rules per event, per ticket type, or across your whole account.
Every resale also tells you who bought, what they paid, and when. Those buyers are the warmest audience you will ever have for your next launch, because they paid above face value to get in this time.
Their profiles flow straight into your CRM, where you can build a segment of recent resale buyers and reach them first the next time you put tickets on sale.
On the fraud side, the ticket itself is a dynamic QR that refreshes every three seconds, so a buyer cannot screenshot the code and resell it on a side channel after the fact.
Marketing attribution that survives cookie blocking
You can connect Meta, TikTok, and Google Analytics 4 to Celebratix in a few clicks, with no Zapier middleman. Every checkout reports back through server-side tracking, so the conversion lands in your ad accounts even when the visitor declines cookies, uses an ad blocker, or is on a privacy-first browser. On top of that you can generate tracking links for any campaign, partner, or influencer, and see clicks, conversion rate, and revenue per link inside the same dashboard.
What that means in practice is that you stop guessing which channel actually drove the sale, you stop paying for ads that look great in the platform dashboard and disappear in the real numbers, and you stop having to choose between accurate marketing data and respecting your visitors' privacy preferences.
A CRM that nurtures your audience without you maintaining it
Every ticket sale, transfer, resale, guestlist check-in, scan, pre-registration, and opt-in feeds your CRM automatically.
You can see who bought early, who came back across editions, who entered through the guestlist, and who showed up versus who did not. From that data you build segments that actually mean something for nightlife.
A Meta custom audience of your VIP buyers from last year. The fans who came to your last edition but have not bought yet this year. The resale buyers from your last launch who you want to reach first when the next phase opens.
Those segments connect directly to your email and WhatsApp campaigns inside the same platform. WhatsApp is one of the fastest ways to reach a high-intent ticket buyer around launches, reminders, and last-minute releases, and your campaigns inside Celebratix go out from Meta-approved templates without you maintaining a separate WhatsApp Business stack.
There is also a scan trigger you can use at the door, so the moment a ticket scans in, your venue can fire a WhatsApp with house rules, set times, or merch alerts.
Data-backed decisions, ready before you ask
The forecast tool projects your sales seven and thirty days out based on how tickets are moving right now, so you can push harder, adjust pricing, or move budget before it is too late. You see the split between new and returning customers on every event, which tells you whether you are growing your audience or refilling it.
You can compare any event against any other by phase, ticket type, or channel, and if you are switching to Celebratix from Paylogic, Eventix, or another platform, you can import your historical sales so the comparisons work from day one.
Launch a new event in a few clicks
Setting up a new event in Celebratix is one screen. You upload an image or pick one from your library, type the name, set the start and end times, add a venue and address, and write a short description.
Everything else, including the resale rules, the dynamic QR, the queue for peak load, and the integrations with your ad platforms, is already configured at the account level. If you run a club that does an event every weekend, you can duplicate a previous setup and change the date in seconds.
A ticket shop built to convert
Your ticket shop is often the first place a fan becomes a customer, so it needs to load fast, look like your event, and make buying easy on a phone. Your shop carries your logo, your colours, and your event identity, and every part of it is built for phones first. The checkout takes a few taps from selection to payment, with Adyen handling the transaction so your revenue goes straight to your account.
When a big release brings tens of thousands of fans to your shop at the same moment, an automated queue kicks in to protect the platform and gives everyone a fair spot in line. After purchase, your buyers can use dynamic QR tickets, Apple Wallet passes, or Apple Wallet NFC tap-to-enter, which we shipped first in the Benelux in partnership with Apple.
Real human support, in your language, on WhatsApp
Every organiser on Celebratix gets a direct WhatsApp line to our team in English, Dutch, German, or French. When tickets go on sale, doors open, or something breaks five minutes before showtime, you reach a human who knows your account and your event, not a chatbot and not an anonymous ticket queue.
We hire people who have worked events themselves, because they understand the difference between a normal question and a door problem that needs attention right now.
How this compares with what you have today
A simplified view of the gaps you live with on a legacy platform, and how Celebratix closes each one.
| What you need | Legacy ticketing platforms | Third-party resale sites | Celebratix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resale revenue | Goes to the platform or a third party | Buyer and seller fees collected, organiser cut depends on opt-in | The bulk of fees flows back to you, with rules you set |
| Email and WhatsApp marketing | Export your data, push it into Mailchimp or another tool | Not offered | Built in, with real-time CRM segments and Meta-approved WhatsApp templates |
| Marketing attribution | Mostly pixel only, with cookie-blocked gaps | Not offered | Native Meta, TikTok, and GA4 with server-side tracking |
| Time to launch a new event | Multiple screens and forms | Not applicable | A few clicks from image to live shop |
| Resale fraud control | Static PDF QR codes that can be screenshotted | External marketplace owns the experience | Dynamic QR refreshing every three seconds |
| Customer support during a live event | Tickets, queues, and chatbots | Buyer-focused support only | Direct WhatsApp line to a human in your language |
Why we are choosing to be loud about this
We hold a strong opinion about this industry. The legacy platforms are outdated and built for a version of events that no longer exists, and the corporate groups that bought them are not in a hurry to fix that.
That is the gap we are running into every day, and that is what we are building Celebratix to close.
We are smaller than the incumbents, we move faster, and we still care, and that combination is what nightlife operators have been telling us they want.
If you run a club, a festival, a sports event, or any kind of recurring event in Europe, and you are tired of juggling six tools, exporting CSVs at midnight, paying TicketSwap for your own fans, and waiting on Monday for a reply about your Saturday night door issue, we built Celebratix for you.
You can read how Liquicity built their highest-converting festival shop on Celebratix, or see how Jimmy Woo turned visitor data into ticket sales. And if you want to talk to us directly, we are on WhatsApp, the same way our customers are.
