Hobbist started as a favour.
It grew into EventMonster.
We built the first version to help a handful of people we knew run their events without losing money to fees or losing their guest list to someone else's platform. The name changed. The reason we do it hasn't.
EventMonster didn't start as a company. It started as Hobbist, a small tool we put together to help a few people we knew — a community quiz night, a local promoter, a couple of societies running termly socials — sell tickets without handing a chunk of their door money to a platform that had nothing to do with the event.
Those first organisers weren't strangers. They were people whose problems we already knew, because they'd complained about them to us directly: fees that ate their margin, sign-up flows built for enterprise box offices, and no real way to see who'd actually turned up at the door. Hobbist existed to fix exactly those things for exactly those people.
Word travelled the way it does in these communities — one organiser telling another. Every new group brought a slightly different version of the same complaint, and every complaint became a feature: a QR scanner for the venues that didn't want a laptop on the door, cash-on-entry for the events that didn't want Stripe at all, real ownership of attendee data for the organisers who'd built their audience one event at a time and didn't want to hand the list to us either.
Eventually the tool outgrew the name. What had been a favour for people we knew became a platform other organisers were finding on their own — and EventMonster was the name that stuck. The mission stayed exactly the same: take the known, familiar pains of running an event and make them disappear, so organisers can spend their energy growing the thing they're actually trying to build.
What we kept hearing
The same three frustrations, from every organiser Hobbist ever talked to.
Fees nobody agreed to
Community organisers and small venues watched 5–10% of every ticket disappear before it reached them.
Tools built for enterprises
Local promoters and volunteer-run societies were stuck with dashboards designed for stadium tours, not a Friday night in a church hall.
Data that wasn't theirs
The people who built an audience one event at a time didn't own the list of who showed up.
What hasn't changed
The name is different. The commitments we made to the first organisers aren't.
Keep what you earn
Zero platform fees, then and now. If you sell online, the money goes to your own Stripe account. If you take cash at the door, it never touches us at all.
Built with the people who use it
The organisers, promoters, and volunteers who first used Hobbist shaped what EventMonster became — most of our roadmap still starts as a message from someone running an event.
Grow without the friction
Every feature we've added exists to remove one specific obstacle an organiser hit while trying to grow their event — not to look good on a features page.
We solve the problems real organisers already have — so the events they've built can keep growing without a platform taking a cut along the way.
Ready to keep what you earn?
Free to sign up. No credit card required.
No credit card required · Free forever