PricedIn

Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

The live concerts and events ticket market is highly fragmented and structural broken due to deceptive "drip pricing". Ticket buyers are routinely hit with hidden booking and facility fees, averaging at 30 % on the face value, which are completely until the checkout screen.

This problem directly affects:

London Event-Goers: Over 71% of concert-goers now think twice before purchasing tickets due to unexpected costs.

Music Tourists: Over 23.5 million music tourists visited London in 2024 who navigate unfamiliar ticketing platforms and face unexpected fee spikes.

The Local Economy: Deceptive pricing creates friction in London's massive £6.68 billion live entertainment market

Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

Our project "PricedIn" is London's 1st transparent ticket comparison platform. It reduces the checkout anxiety by enforcing total price transparency upfront.

The platform solves the problem through three pillars:

Aggregate: It scrapes and normalizes pricing data across primary and secondary platforms like Ticketmaster, Skiddle, and See Tickets in real time.

Disclose: It displays a complete, honest cost breakdown, including face value, booking fees, and facility fees, before the user clicks buy.

Empower: It allows users to quickly compare the absolute lowest "true cost" across the entire market, bypassing bait-and-switch tactics.

Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together? Does your frontend make requests to your backend? Where does your database fit in?

Architecture: Our hackathon project is built using frontend technology HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To maximise the speed of the development and focus on user experience, there is no active backend or database infrastructure in this version. We compare base prices and hidden breakdown price of the tickets to help customers understand the hidden fees. We used data from other ticket platforms.

Data & Integration: Instead of live API calls or scraping workers, the frontend utilises pre-compiled, highly realistic JSON data structures mapped directly within the JavaScript layer. This simulates real-time data fetching, allowing judges to interact with the UI, search for events, and see the exact upfront fee breakdowns as if the platform were fully live.

Future State: This interface serves as the definitive frontend architecture. The next phase of development will introduce a backend routing layer to swap our simulated data arrays with live and official ticketing APIs.

Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

The Challenge: Accessing live, structured data on exact ticketing fee breakdowns within a short hackathon window. Most official ticketing APIs are heavily locked down and require extensive provider surveys, compliance vetting, and approval wait times before granting access.

How We Overcame It: We shifted our strategy to focus entirely on an optimized, frontend interface. To ensure our simulated data was 100% accurate to real market conditions, we audited and utilized industry research from ticketingfees.co.uk to manually map out real-world platform fee structures directly into our local frontend JSON arrays. This allowed us to successfully prove our user interface and transparency value proposition without being bottlenecked by third-party API approval delays.

Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish?

What We Learned

• Gained a deep understanding of how "drip pricing" creates massive consumer friction and hesitance in the live entertainment market.

• Discovered that official ticketing APIs are heavily gated behind intensive compliance vetting, requiring strategic workarounds for short-term validation.

• Learned how to audit independent research from platforms like ticketingfees.co.uk to extract authentic market data patterns without relying on live streams.

What We Accomplished

• Built a Fully Interactive Interface: Successfully engineered a client-side frontend application that handles the complete user flow and search experience seamlessly.

• Integrated Factual Fee Structures: Mapped genuine industry markup data directly into our local JavaScript layer to ensure the interface reflects true checkout numbers.

• Bypassed API Roadblocks: Successfully turned an administrative bottleneck into a design win, proving our product value proposition using a standalone interface.

• Validated a Privacy-First Concept: Mapped out a sustainable affiliate model that operates cleanly without collecting, tracking, or storing any personal user data.

Next Steps

What are the next steps for your project? How can you improve it?

In future we will change our current GitHub Pages interface from local JSON data to an active server-side architecture. We will add backend functionality in the future. Add Ticketmaster API to get base cost, event name, artist name, location, date and time etc, Skiddle API and Google Map API.

Complete Administrative Compliance: Complete the formal provider applications, data licensing agreements, and vetting surveys that were omitted during the hackathon to secure official, authorised API endpoints.