What is SeatLayer?

SeatLayer is a reserved-seating platform for products and organizers that need buyers to choose a real seat, table, booth, or a general-admission area inside a seated chart. A pure-GA event without a seating chart is not a supported target. One inventory core supports two deliberately separate products: Platform/SDK infrastructure and SeatLayer-managed ticketing.

You do not need to learn the Designer to make your first chart. Describe the venue in plain words to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or SeatLayer Copilot, and SeatLayer builds the chart: see your first chart with AI.

For the relationship between inventory, audience access, pricing, and every SDK or API surface, read the SeatLayer product model.

For every ready-made surface, what it does and where its responsibility stops, read product surfaces and their purpose.

Two objects power everything

Seat lifecycle

The picker receives inventory updates in realtime, so buyers see a seat disappear before they can select stale inventory. A successful booking is all-or-nothing: conflicts return without partially booking the request.

Choose the product boundary first

SeatLayer Platform / Seating Infrastructure

Use this for a marketplace or ticketing platform that already owns its event catalogue and commerce. SeatLayer supplies workspaces, charts, event inventory, buyer SDKs, holds, idempotent booking, webhooks, inventory reports, and embedded Designer/Control room tools.

Your platform remains the sole owner of buyer accounts, checkout and payment, commercial Orders, ticket/QR/PDF creation and delivery, email, refunds, check-in, and customer support. bookingRef links your order to the SeatLayer inventory booking; SeatLayer does not mirror that purchase into its hosted fulfilment product.

SeatLayer Hosted Ticketing

Use this when a direct organizer wants SeatLayer to run the end-to-end sale. Hosted Ticketing is self-serve: there is no access request or approval step. The organizer creates a full event in the dashboard and connects their own payment gateway on the Payments page (Stripe, PayPal, Square, Braintree, Authorize.Net, Checkout.com, Mollie, Razorpay, Tap, Mercado Pago, Xendit, Flutterwave, Paystack or iyzico). A free event needs no payment account. SeatLayer can then provide hosted checkout, Orders, tickets, QR/PDF delivery, email, refunds, and Door/check-in through a Hosted Event Page, managed embed, or Organizer Website. The connected provider controls its processing fees, applicable taxes, and payout timing.

Commerce ownership is fixed for an Event. Changing between Platform/SDK and Hosted Ticketing means reusing the Chart and creating a new Event with the intended product boundary.

In a Platform/SDK integration, what stays in your product

• Event catalogue and buyer identity.
• Commercial orders, payments, refunds, fees, and tax logic.
• Tickets, QR/barcodes, PDFs, email delivery, scanning, and support.
• The final decision to confirm a booking.
• Your own checkout UI and business rules.

What the shared SeatLayer inventory core provides

• A white-label Designer for authoring complex venues.
• Stable web SDKs for script tag, JavaScript, React, Vue, and Angular, plus supported production SDKs for React Native, iOS, Android, and Flutter.
• Realtime holds and inventory synchronization.
• Server APIs, signed inventory webhooks, an embeddable Control room, booking history, and inventory reporting.

Current Platform/SDK scope

An Event remains the base inventory boundary. Each Event has its own chart snapshot, availability, channels, and reports. For one fixed run of 2–8 compatible assigned-seat Events, Performance Groups add one coordinated hold and booking flow. For a renewable fixed Plan of 2–20 compatible Events, Fixed Renewable Seasons add same-seat holds and booking, incumbent Seat Rights, renewal offers, occurrence amendments, and operational reports. Reusing one Chart across independent Events alone does not create a Season or shared entitlement.

The current Platform/SDK release does not provide:

• partial or buyer-built Seasons, or arbitrary per-performance Plan overrides;
• arbitrary event baskets, buyer-selected date subsets, or partial status changes across a Performance Group;
• organizer-defined custom inventory statuses;
• true partial-GA channel allocation or season-inherited channels; or
• cross-product aggregate reporting beyond the documented Performance Group and Season contracts.

Booked seats can be listed for resale on their event. A listed seat stays booked until a new buyer books it, then moves to the new booking. Resale moves seats only: the resale price, the new buyer’s payment, and any refund or payout to the original holder stay in your system. Separately, unbook returns booked inventory to free for an ordinary new sale.

Open-source resources

The SeatLayer platform and inventory service remain private. Public repositories contain supported SDKs, examples, and agent-integration tooling.