Standing Room Society

"The Cheapest Seats are No Seats"

Every Broadway and Off-Broadway production runs its own lottery, rush, and standing-room policy, and the details are scattered across pinned social posts, venue FAQ pages, and a handful of third-party lottery apps. Standing Room Society pulls all of it into one standardized directory: every show currently running in New York, what discount options it offers, and a direct link to enter or buy, updated every morning.

What it does

• Lists every Broadway and Off-Broadway show in one place, filterable by category and searchable by title.
• Surfaces each show's lottery, rush, and standing-room options, linked directly to where you enter or buy.
• Includes the theater and address, run dates, and weekly performance schedule on every card.
• Flags shows that are coming soon, running for a limited engagement, or closing soon, so last chances don't slip by.
• Lets theatergoers share in a few taps whether they got tickets and what they paid, building a running tally for each show.

Technical Highlights

Built as a lightweight static site with no server to maintain. A scraper runs automatically every morning to pick up new shows, closing dates, and performance schedules, then redeploys the site, so the directory stays current with no manual upkeep. Poster art is cached locally to keep the grid loading fast.

Ticket offers change too often to scrape reliably, so an AI research agent verifies each one against the show's official sources, and I review every change before it goes live. Visitor reports are fully anonymous, with no free-text fields and no personal information collected, and are stored in a secured database that limits each device to editing its own reports.

Why I built it

Tracking same-day ticket options meant checking a different site for every show, and half of that information was out of date. I built Standing Room Society to be the one place theatergoers can check before heading to Midtown. The visitor reports grew out of that: the listings say what's offered, while the reports show how it's actually going at the box office.