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For events with no ticket price

Free events that still need a headcount

A private view, a story time, a public meeting or a taster session takes no money and still needs to know who is coming, cap the numbers and reach everyone when the date moves. Free listings need no payment provider at all.

Start for £5See pricing
Free listings need no Stripe account
No provider
Capacity for every session
Per date
Names and answers, at rest
Encrypted
A year for charities and community groups
£25

Capacity and confirmations for free bookings

Set a listing's price to zero and it becomes a sign-up form. No payment provider is needed, nothing is charged, and no booking fee is recorded even when the site has one configured for its paid listings.

The same setup covers gallery private views and artist talks, library story times and author events, open studios, repair cafés, taster classes, public meetings and warm spaces.

Each date carries its own capacity, and the form closes itself when the places are gone or the deadline passes. You can also cap how many places one person can claim.

A screenshot of the Free Meetup listing page, showing a ticket price of Free, one of fifty places taken, and gross ticket sales of zero pounds
A listing given away for free still counts the places taken, and records no money against them. (src)

The tools a paid event uses, minus the payment

A free booking sends the same confirmation email, carries the same QR code, and can be checked in at the door with a phone camera, so you know who turned up rather than who signed up.

Custom questions collect access needs, ages of children, dietary details or which shift somebody wants. Groups put several sessions or shifts on one page, each with its own places.

When a session has to move, you can email everyone booked on the listing through your own email provider. News about a booking reaches everyone who left an email address, including anyone who has unsubscribed from promotions.

On a repeating session you can write to one date instead, chosen from that date on the listing's attendee list.

  • Confirmation emails on free bookings.
  • Check-in, so you know who came.
  • Access needs asked at sign-up.

Data collection and privacy

You choose which contact fields a listing asks for, in any combination of email, phone and postal address, so a free talk need not collect a home address it will never use. Keep the email address if you may need to tell people the session has moved, because that is where the message goes.

Names, contact details and answers are encrypted in the database. Chobble does not email the people who sign up, does not advertise other events to them and does not sell the list.

The privacy tools erase a person's contact record on request, which covers the recognition and contact history without touching their bookings. Deleting a listing leaves its bookings behind, and those can be cleared out on a retention period you choose.

  • Ask for less than a ticket shop would.
  • Encrypted names, details and answers.
  • Erasure and purging built in.

Features for free events

  • Community rate

    Charities, community groups, artists and musicians pay £25 a year, half the annual price. The discount does not apply to monthly billing.

  • CSV export

    Export the sign-up list with question answers and check-in state as CSV.

  • Manual attendees

    Add walk-ins to the list on the day so the record matches the room.

  • Calendar and RSS feeds

    Publish free sessions as a calendar feed people can subscribe to, and a feed that listings sites can read.

  • Your public website

    Publish a site for the programme on your own domain, or embed sign-up in the site you already have.

What it does not do

Managed hosting costs the same whether the events are free or paid, so an organisation that takes no money still pays £50 a year, or £25 a year if it qualifies for the community rate. An organisation that would rather run the software on its own server pays Chobble nothing for it, and pays whoever hosts that server instead.

Nothing stops a free booking becoming a no-show. Check-in records who arrived, which is how a repeating session learns what its real attendance is, but the places are held for whoever claimed them until you release them.

There is no waiting list. When a session is full, later visitors are told it is full rather than queued.

Related uses

Community centres and village halls covers the buildings many free sessions run in. Charity events covers ticketed and fundraising events for the same organisations, and political organising covers meetings that need the same encrypted records.