Skip to content

Sectors · Festivals and live events

Festivals and live events. Your festival app holds up on opening weekend.

Polargate builds and runs the official apps and websites of festivals and venues, and proved them on the 2026 Concert Music Festival season.

Book a callTell us about your project
A production manager at a festival at dusk, radio in hand and the running order on a tablet.

The problem

What we hear on the first call.

If any of these sounds familiar, that is where we start.

  1. 01

    We update the line-up on the website and the app still shows last week's.

  2. 02

    Every small change needs a new app version, and Apple takes days we do not have.

  3. 03

    The site went down the morning tickets went on sale.

  4. 04

    We have been sending push notifications all season and nobody seems to get them.

  5. 05

    Another agency built the app, and neither the database nor the store accounts are really ours.

  6. 06

    My marketing team lives in WordPress and is not going to learn a second admin panel.

  7. 07

    During the event weekend there is nobody senior to call when something breaks.

For example: 4 days from diagnosis to the new backend running. Concert Music Festival

Book a callTell us about your project

Projects · Festivals and live events

What we build.

Each piece connects to the systems you already use, and everything stays in accounts your company owns.

  • 01

    Festival and venue apps for iOS and Android: line-up, timetable, favourites, site map, news, media, transport, food and account, built once in Capacitor and published to both stores.

  • 02

    A content pipeline from the CMS your team already uses, copying images and PDFs into your own storage so the app does not depend on the website at runtime.

  • 03

    Over-the-air updates through the Polargate release hub, with channels, staged rollout, per-platform targeting and a kill switch, so fixes land during the event weekend.

  • 04

    Push notifications end to end: direct APNs and FCM, scheduled campaigns, delivery auditing, deep links into the app and a remote switch per platform.

  • 05

    Static, CDN-served event sites and landing pages that hold up on announcement and on-sale days, with your ticketing platform linked or embedded rather than replaced.

  • 06

    Release automation: iOS through Xcode Cloud from a git tag, Android through GitHub Actions to Google Play, submissions handled by the store APIs.

  • 07

    Download plumbing: device-aware smart links, a native Apple smart banner on your site, and print QR codes for posters and on-site signage.

Backstage at a concert: a phone has just scanned a crew member's QR badge and shows access granted for a sound technician, with the stage, backstage and dressing rooms listed.

For example: 11 modules delivered in Phase 1. Elite Smart Build

Book a callTell us about your project

Work · Festivals and live events

Work in this sector.

Real projects. Open each one to see what we built and the figures we measured.

For example: 2 languages live on the site, Spanish and English. Global Dynamic Security Group

Book a callTell us about your projectAll work

In detail · Festivals and live events

What you should know.

For example: 536/536 translation keys present in each of the three languages. Estepona Golf

Book a callTell us about your project

What changes in this sector

Your product has a date on it. A hotel site can be fixed next Tuesday. A festival app cannot, because next Tuesday the gates are open and thousands of people are looking at a timetable that changed an hour ago. Three consequences follow. Content has to move without an engineer: line-ups shift, set times move, an artist cancels on the Friday. The store review queue does not fit a live event, so you need a way to put changes on phones the same day. And traffic is not a curve, it is a wall: announcement day, on-sale day, first night.

We met all three at once at Concert Music Festival in Sancti Petri, Cádiz. Its team wanted the official app to follow the line-up live, with every new artist on phones the same day, and the season started in ten days.

How it is priced

It starts with a paid two-week Discovery Sprint, and you leave with scope, architecture and a fixed price. An event or venue site and a native app for iOS and Android are then built at that price. If you would rather not carry a build budget, some events run on an operating model instead: a monthly fee plus scoped extras. Care, our senior maintenance retainer, keeps it running between editions. Tell us about your event and you get a private quote.

How we work

From brief to production.

Every project starts with a paid Discovery Sprint that closes scope and price, and every change goes through the same loop of building, auditing and fixing until two passes come back clean.

01The four phases

  1. 01

    Discover

    Two paid weeks that end in a closed scope, an architecture and a fixed price.

  2. 02

    Build

    Senior engineers with AI, a review on every change and a production release in weeks.

  3. 03

    Grow

    Search, AI assistants and paid media, measured from the first week.

  4. 04

    Care

    Monthly maintenance with a first answer within 48 business hours.

For example: 22 public routes prerendered as static HTML. Hotel Marien

Book a callTell us about your project

FAQ

What people ask us.

Can a festival app work with the website and ticketing platform we already use?
Yes, and that is usually the point. At Concert Music Festival the line-up lives in WordPress with Modern Events Calendar, so Polargate wrote a plugin that exposes it properly and a sync that runs every 30 minutes into the app's own database. Ticketing stays where it is, linked or embedded. Plan a manual fallback: some ticketing vendors are slow to open their API.
How much does a festival or venue app cost?
It depends on what the app has to do on the day: tickets, schedule, maps, push, offline use. A native app for iOS and Android and an event site both have a fixed price, set in a paid two-week Discovery Sprint. Some events prefer an operating model with no large build up front: a monthly fee plus scoped extras. Senior maintenance runs as a monthly retainer. Tell us about your event and you get a private quote.
Can you change something in the app during the festival weekend without waiting for Apple?
On iOS, yes. Polargate ships over-the-air updates from its own release hub, so text, layout and fixes reach installed apps in minutes, with staged rollout and a kill switch. Native changes, such as a new permission, still need a store release. We currently keep over-the-air updates off on Android, after a bundle crashed the WebView on a real device in July 2026.
Do we need a new app every year for the next edition?
No. One app carries every edition. The finished edition stays in the database and a single presentation switch moves the app into next-edition mode, hiding countdowns, favourites and timetable and putting a teaser in their place. For Concert Music Festival that changeover was deployed in one day over the air, on 25 August 2026, with nothing submitted to the stores.
Will our site stay up when tickets go on sale?
That is an architecture question, not a hosting plan. Polargate builds event sites as static pages served from a CDN, with dynamic parts isolated behind an API, so a spike hits cache instead of a database. We also move heavy media out of the app bundle and off the critical path: one client video went from 96 MB to 7.5 MB. What happens inside your ticketing vendor is theirs, not ours.
Who owns the app, the code and the store accounts?
You do. Polargate works in your own store accounts wherever possible and hands over the repository, the database and the signing material on request. For Concert Music Festival we moved 26 tables, 12 functions and 62 user accounts onto infrastructure that can be handed over intact. If you leave, you leave with everything.

For example: 16 indexable URLs, Spanish and English. Hotel Talavera

Book a callTell us about your project

Get started

Tell us what you want to build.

Websites, apps, custom systems and AI for companies that need them in production in weeks. Fill in the form or book a 30 minute call: a senior engineer answers within 48 business hours with a first take on scope, timeline and price.

Book a 30 minute call
What do you need?
Budget
When

At least ten characters.

Answer in writing within 48 business hours. No newsletter, no automatic sequence.

Rather answer the full brief?

First step

Discovery Sprint

Two weeks to close scope, architecture and price before anything is built.

No price list. You get a private quote, in writing, after a short call.

Then, to build, always at a fixed price

Ask for your quoteHow we quote

Not ready yet?

AI-native digital studio for mid-market companies

POLARGATE, S.L. · CIF B24895005
Calle Electrónica 6, 28027 Madrid, Spain