GoKawiilIt can’t be all party all the time. Eventually, somebody’s got to pay the piper.
That looks to be the case for Partiful, the popular social events platform that people use to plan parties big and small. On Tuesday, Partiful announced its first major monetization plan in its six-year history: tickets that attendees can buy directly on Partiful.
Collecting payment for tickets wasn’t something the platform offered before; instead, hosts who used Partiful to plan paid events could include links that took guests off the platform to process ticket purchases elsewhere. The app will now let hosts of paid events handle the ticket-selling process directly in the app. That means processing different ticket tiers, setting capacity limits, handling payments, and verifying ticket QR codes at entry points when people show up for events. In return, Partiful gets a cut of the sales, which the host can either factor into pricing or pass on to the buyer as a fee.
Partiful CEO Shreya Murthy says that putting ticketing directly in Partiful was a way to remove some of the friction that event hosts experience when trying to get people to pay for tickets.
“We built this not because we felt the need to monetize; we really built it in response to a problem that hosts were facing,” Murthy says. “This is the first big monetization feature that we've had on the platform, and it won't be the last.”
Party People
Courtesy of Partiful
Partiful was founded in 2020 by Murthy and Joy Tao, both former Palantir employees. The service really took off in the post-pandemic heyday around 2021, when people were struck with a renewed interest in going out into society. Things really panned out for Partiful in 2024, when it was the hub of invites for a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest.
Partiful has been a free service since the beginning, buoyed by $27 million of venture capital funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz. It has leveraged that to build out a platform that lets millions of users send out invites to birthday parties, block parties, trinket trades, and local city events.
On its website, a page aptly titled “How do you make money?” Partiful says its “core product is free, and always will be,” but that it will begin introducing new features that users will have the option to pay for. Tickets are the start of that. They’re also the start of what feels like a new era for Partiful, as this move seems to run counter to what the company has said about its plans before.