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Enshittification-resistant ticket sales

"Enshittification" is writer Cory Doctorow's name for the pattern by which online platforms decay. Chobble Tickets is structured against it: an open licence, an asset-locked company, one price with no tiers, no free plan, prepaid terms, encrypted attendee records, open APIs and payments that go straight to the organiser.

What enshittification means

The writer Cory Doctorow coined the word in 2022, and the American Dialect Society chose it as its 2023 word of the year. In his summary, platforms die in three stages: "first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves."

The pattern runs on what Doctorow calls a two-sided market, a platform sitting between two groups such as sellers and buyers, "holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them". The platform first runs at a loss to attract users, then gives its value to the businesses on the other side, and finally moves the value to its own shareholders. Each step is taken after leaving has become expensive for everyone involved.

What the pattern needs

The pattern runs only where leaving is costly. Doctorow describes the blocks on leaving as the thing that allows a platform to decay without losing its users, and names freedom of exit as the remedy: leaving a platform while keeping the data, purchases and communities held inside it.

Ticketing has the same two sides. The organiser chooses the platform and pays it, and attendees' contact details and purchase records pass through it. The provider directory records how each platform reviewed on this site charges, and what its review found about attendee data and marketing.

Eight structural protections

Chobble Tickets cannot stop the pattern across the ticketing market, and this page does not claim that it can. What its structure does is remove the pattern's preconditions from its own service. Each protection below is a fact about how the product is licensed, owned, sold and connected.

  • An open licence. The complete source is published under AGPL-3.0-only and can be self-hosted, so the exit stays cheap.
  • A community interest company. Chobble CIC has no shareholders and an asset lock, so the final stage has nowhere to pay out.
  • No feature tiers. One service includes every current feature, so an organiser's growth cannot be priced in.
  • No free plan. Every managed site is paid for, so the first stage has nothing to subsidise.
  • No subscription billing. Every prepay term is bought again by the organiser, so income has to be re-earned.
  • Encrypted attendee data. Personal fields are unreadable without the organiser's key, so there is no attendee database to monetise.
  • Open APIs and webhooks. Data is readable by other software and pushed out as it arrives, so an organiser's other tools keep working.
  • Direct payments. Ticket money goes straight to the organiser's payment account, so there is no share of it to raise.

The open licence

The complete product source is published under AGPL-3.0-only. AGPL is a copyleft licence: anyone who runs a changed version of the software as an online service must publish their changes under the same terms. The licence is already granted to everyone who holds the code, and it cannot be revoked for the versions already published.

With the code public, the exit from Chobble's managed service is the software itself. An organiser can move to a self-hosted deployment or to another host running the same code, taking their records through catalogue import and export and database backups. Chobble charges no software licence fee for self-hosting, so the exit costs no more than the infrastructure that runs it.

The company structure

Chobble is a community interest company, Chobble CIC, limited by guarantee without share capital. It has no shareholders, so it cannot pay dividends, and a CIC must reinvest its profits in its stated mission after paying its workers a reasonable wage.

Assets owned by the company, including the Chobble Tickets source code, cannot be transferred to a private owner. The asset lock allows them to move only to another asset-locked body, such as another CIC or a registered charity, and the CIC Regulator oversees the lock. Why Chobble Tickets cannot go closed source sets this out in full.

The pattern's final stage moves value to a platform's shareholders. A company with no share capital, no dividends and no sellable assets has no final stage available.

No feature tiers

Managed hosting is one service: £50 a year or £5 a month, or £25 a year for charities, community groups, artists and musicians. Every current product feature is included, and no rate varies by ticket value, ticket volume or feature use.

A tier ladder turns usage into price. Among the platforms reviewed on this site, that includes free plans capped at a monthly ticket volume and features split across plans, as the provider directory records. Chobble Tickets has no higher plan to move features into and no lower plan to move them out of, so an organiser's costs cannot rise because their event sold more tickets or needed another feature.

No free plan

The pattern's first stage is a platform paying users to arrive. In Doctorow's account of Amazon, the company sold below cost for years, funded by investors, until customers had few other places to shop. The service run at a loss is the first stage's tool, and the losses are recovered once the users are locked in.

Chobble Tickets has no free hosted plan. Every managed site is paid for by the organiser who runs it, and Chobble's income comes from the prepay terms organisers choose to buy and from technical work, not from advertising or attendee data. The only way to run the software without paying Chobble is to self-host the published code, which involves no Chobble service at all.

No subscription billing

Chobble does not use subscription billing. Organisers pay for a month or a year in advance, Chobble does not store card details for automatic renewal, and nothing is charged unless the organiser returns to pay for another term.

A recurring charge keeps collecting while a service gets worse, because the default is to keep paying. Under prepay hosting, each further term is a purchase the organiser makes again, so a service that declines has to keep being worth buying.

If a paid term ends without renewal, the site stays online in read-only mode for 24 months. The organiser keeps full read access, can export attendee records and download a full database backup, and owes no back-payment for the read-only months. There is no card on file, no dormant account and no automatic charge to cancel.

Encrypted attendee data

Chobble Tickets encrypts attendee names, contact details, payment references and free-text answers before saving them. The keys that unlock them stay with the organiser's keyed administration accounts, and a database dump on its own cannot reveal the protected fields. Who can see your data lists every service that can receive attendee records.

In Doctorow's account of Facebook, the platform's second side is advertisers paying to reach users through profiles assembled from harvested data. The ticketing equivalent would be a cross-event attendee database: many organisers' contact records pooled in one readable place. Chobble cannot assemble one, because the operator cannot read the records it hosts. Attendees get no Chobble account, no marketplace and no mailing list, and Chobble does not use attendee records for advertising, audience profiles or marketing other events.

Open APIs and webhooks

Doctorow names blocked interoperability, such as banned third-party clients and narrowed APIs, among the things that make the decay easier, because each blocked door adds to the cost of leaving. The reverse also holds: data that other software can read cheaply keeps the exit open.

Chobble Tickets keeps its data reachable. The public API serves listings, availability and bookings as JSON without a key, so the organiser's own website can be the shop window. The admin API drives listings, groups and holidays with named keys the organiser can revoke. A webhook POSTs every booking to any URL, keeping Slack channels, spreadsheets, mailing lists and CRMs up to date, and those receiving systems hold their own copies of what they receive.

All of this is included in the one service. There is no integration tier to buy, no charge per connected tool, and no step where an integration moves behind a paywall.

Direct payments

Chobble Tickets does not process ticket money. The attendee pays into the organiser's own Stripe, Square or SumUp account, and Chobble neither holds ticket income nor deducts a platform fee from it.

The pattern's core motion is raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between the two sides. A platform that sits in the money flow can raise its share once organisers and attendees depend on it, and reviews on this site record platforms that hold ticket income until after an event before paying it out. Money that never passes through Chobble has no share to raise and no balance to hold.

Service, every feature included
1
Feature tiers or free plans
0
Automatic card charges
0
Months to export before deletion
24

What an organiser can do

Resistance to the pattern is measured at the exit. The structural protections above become these actions, available at any time:

What the structure does not do

The structure does not freeze the price or the feature set. The £50 annual rate is the current rate, and future versions can add, change or remove features.

Whether the service stays good is the work of the people running it. What the structure secures is the exit: the code stays published, the data stays exportable, and the terms stay prepaid. An organiser who decides the service has become worse can leave with their records, their domain and their ticket income already in their own hands.

References