Partiful is bringing ticket payments to its platform.

We can't party all the time. Eventually, someone will have to pay the price.

This seems to be the case with 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 purchase directly on Partiful.

Collecting ticket payment was not something the platform offered before; instead, hosts who used Partiful to plan paid events could include links that caused guests to leave the platform to process ticket purchases elsewhere. The app will now allow paid event organizers to manage the ticket sales process directly within the app. This means processing different ticket levels, setting capacity limits, managing payments, and checking ticket QR codes at entry points when people show up to events. In return, Partiful receives a share of the sales, which the host can either factor into pricing or pass it on to the buyer in the form of a fee.

Shreya Murthy, CEO of Partiful, says putting ticketing directly into Partiful was a way to eliminate some of the friction event organizers face 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 explains. “This is the first major monetization feature we have on the platform, and it won’t be the last.”

The party people

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 hit with a renewed interest in going out in society. Things really worked out for Partiful in 2024, when it was the hub of invitations for a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest.

Partiful has been a free service from the start, backed by $27 million in venture funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz. He leveraged this to create a platform that allows millions of users to send invitations to birthday parties, block parties, trinket exchanges, and local civic events.

On its website, a page aptly titled “How to earn 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. This is also the start of what appears to be a new era for Partiful, as this move appears to go against what the company has already said about its plans.

"Partiful won't make money. There's no large-scale pitch," Partiful posted via tweet in 2023, adding, "Investors gave us money to help you party, and that's what we're here for. Enjoy it, baby."

In a call with WIRED, Murthy said the tweet was always meant to be a joke.

“It's kind of funny how many people took it literally, and now it follows us everywhere and it's become a meme,” Murthy said. “But it’s nice to say that Partiful is monetizing now.”

Last call

Partiful has succeeded in part because of its ability to channel a kind of public fantasy and strangeness that people seek to participate in. Just a quick glance at a list of events in the Bay Area shows events like “Open Paint Night,” “Capture the Flag” and “Bean-Up.” (The description says: "Do you like beans?" 42 people report going there at the time of writing.) The service has its detractors, but it has proven very popular with people looking to organize quick meetings or offbeat social experiences.

Partiful couldn't have lived forever on good vibes alone. Especially when it faces challengers like Facebook events, Apple invitations or the new invitation application, Luma. But the decision to build a financial future risks making users nervous. Enshittification is trendy, after all, and users have seen service after service get bogged down in growth-driven monetization machinations that ultimately inflate the experience and alienate users.

“I would say that with the launch of ticketing, it is an act of desensitization,” says Murthy. "Today's experience is weird for hosts, and it's weird for guests. This process that people were already going through is now streamlined right in Partiful."

Murthy says she wants Partiful to focus on smaller, community-focused events, rather than directly targeting ticketing giants like AXS or Ticketmaster that handle ticket sales for larger events. The immediate plan isn't to become a platform selling tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras tour, but when asked if that's the goal, Murthy isn't depressed.

“Look, if Taylor Swift reads this article, please write that I would love for her to have her gig on Partiful,” Murthy says. “She can ask her people to contact my people.”