Here's a problem that shouldn't still exist in 2026: there is no good way to find out what's on this weekend unless you already follow the right five Instagram accounts. Facebook Events used to be that layer — you'd see a friend was going to something, tap in, done. Its public Events search API has been gated to Meta Marketing Partners only since 2018. Eventbrite's public search API only returns your own organisation's events, which is useless if you don't run one. Meetup's ToS explicitly bans scraping for commercial use. Scraping any of them yourself is legally defensible but practically fragile — one markup change and your pipeline is dead.
So the actual discovery layer for "what's happening near me" quietly evaporated, and it got replaced by the least reliable system available: a scattered group chat where someone posts a link, three people say "keen," and by the time anyone checks how many tickets to actually buy, the good tickets are gone.
That's the problem GigFiend solves. Swipe through local gigs and events, right-swipe the ones you're into, invite your friends to a specific show, and watch a live tally of who's actually in before you buy anything. It doesn't try to sell you tickets — it hands off to the real ticket source once you know the headcount, the same way it should have worked all along.
Where the data actually comes from
Ticketmaster's Discovery API is free, self-serve, and covers Australia — but it's concerts and major venues only, nothing in the community-event long tail. PredictHQ fills that gap for local/community listings and has a usable free tier. Between the two, plus organiser self-submission down the line, there's an actual data source instead of a dead API and a prayer.
The swipe deck itself stays deliberately boring: date-order only, no algorithmic ranking, no push notifications, no in-app payments. Every one of those is a real feature I want eventually, and every one of them is cut from the current build on purpose. A coordination tool that's still guessing at your taste in month one is worse than one that just shows you what's on, in order, and gets out of the way.
Tap a card instead of swiping it and it opens up into the full picture — every session it's running (not just the next one), price, genre, a real description pulled straight from the listing, a link to the venue on Google Maps, and the same Pass/I'm In decision at the bottom so you're never stuck without an exit.
The part nobody puts in the demo
The account page is the least exciting screen in the app and the one I spent real time on anyway: your name and photo come straight from Google (no separate profile to babysit), a Sydney/Melbourne city toggle controls what the deck actually loads, and deleting your account really deletes your account — your swipes, the invites you sent, gone, not soft-deleted-and-still-in-a-table-somewhere. Melbourne is flagged honestly as thinner on events for now rather than pretending it's at parity with Sydney. Nobody screenshots the delete-account flow for a portfolio, but it's the flow that tells you whether the rest of the app was built carefully or just built fast.
What's still missing, on purpose
No in-app checkout — GigFiend's job ends at "you know how many tickets to buy and where," then it deep-links out to the real ticket source. No push notifications. No taste-based ranking; that's earned once there's real swipe data to rank against, not guessed at from day one. Every surviving player in this space — Partiful, Fever, Posh — eventually monetises through an actual transaction rather than ads, and that's the honest direction here too, just not yet: the coordination loop has to prove itself first.
Try it
It's live at gigfiend.skunk.systems, Sydney first, Melbourne close behind. Sign in with Google, swipe on something, and see if the group chat can finally retire.