---
title: "What is SeatLayer?"
description: "One seating inventory core for platform integrations and SeatLayer-managed ticketing."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.seatlayer.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# 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.

> **The Platform/SDK contract**
>
> The **browser holds** inventory temporarily. **Your server books inventory**
> after it has inspected the hold and completed your payment or order logic.
> Your platform creates and delivers its own tickets.

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](/start/first-chart-with-ai/).

For the relationship between inventory, audience access, pricing, and every SDK
or API surface, read the [SeatLayer product model](/start/product-model/).

For every ready-made surface, what it does and where its responsibility stops,
read [product surfaces and their purpose](/start/product-model/#product-surfaces-and-their-purpose).

## Two objects power everything

- **Chart** — The reusable venue document: rows, tables, booths, GA areas, sections, accessibility metadata, and pricing categories.
- **Event** — One independent realtime inventory occurrence created from a published
chart snapshot. Reuse one chart for many performances. An Event does not by
itself imply a public page, checkout, order, or ticket.

## Seat lifecycle

| Status | Meaning | Who changes it |
|---|---|---|
| `free` | Available to select | Expiry, release, or operator |
| `held` | Reserved for a short checkout window | Buyer SDK |
| `booked` | Permanently committed inventory | Your server or SeatLayer managed checkout |
| `not_for_sale` | Removed from sale | Organizer or operator |

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](/integrations/performance-groups)
add one coordinated hold and booking flow. For a renewable fixed Plan of 2–20
compatible Events, [Fixed Renewable Seasons](/integrations/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](/server-api/inventory/#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.

> **Current SDK availability**
>
> Web JavaScript, React, Vue, and Angular packages provide their documented
> surfaces. React Native, iOS, Android, and Flutter are supported production
> SDKs. Vue and Angular provide a native Seating Chart wrapper plus the
> raw JavaScript Picker/frame helpers; they do not imply native Designer or
> Control room components.

- **Build the full loop** — Continue to the [Quickstart](/start/quickstart) to create a test event, embed the picker, and confirm a booking.
- **Inspect the server contract** — Jump to the [booking endpoint](/server-api/booking) for request fields, responses, and conflict handling.

## Open-source resources

- **SeatLayer SDK** — Inspect the official JavaScript, React, Vue, and Angular packages in
[seatlayer/seatlayer-sdk](https://github.com/seatlayer/seatlayer-sdk).
- **SeatLayer for Flutter** — Follow the [Flutter seat-map guide](/buyer-sdk/flutter), install
[`seatlayer`](https://pub.dev/packages/seatlayer), or inspect the source in
[seatlayer/seatlayer-flutter](https://github.com/seatlayer/seatlayer-flutter).
- **SeatLayer for React Native** — Build Expo, iOS, and Android applications with
[seatlayer/seatlayer-react-native](https://github.com/seatlayer/seatlayer-react-native).
- **SeatLayer iOS SDK** — Evaluate the public Swift package source in
[seatlayer/seatlayer-ios](https://github.com/seatlayer/seatlayer-ios).
- **SeatLayer Android SDK** — Build native Kotlin applications with
[seatlayer/seatlayer-android](https://github.com/seatlayer/seatlayer-android).
- **SeatLayer AI Toolkit** — Give a coding agent the portable integration skill, diagnostics, and
verification workflow from
[seatlayer/seatlayer-ai-toolkit](https://github.com/seatlayer/seatlayer-ai-toolkit).
- **SeatLayer on GitHub** — Discover all public SeatLayer repositories at
[github.com/seatlayer](https://github.com/seatlayer).

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

Source: https://docs.seatlayer.io/start/overview/index.mdx