I built a live event budgeting tool and would value feedback from people who actually use show budgets
Hi all — I’m looking for practical feedback from people who build, manage or review live event budgets.
I’ve been working on a tool called ShowBudget. It came out of a problem I’ve run into repeatedly: most event budgets still live in Excel or Google Sheets. That makes sense — spreadsheets are fast, flexible and familiar — but once a project starts moving, things can get messy quickly.
ShowBudget is my attempt to create a more structured workflow for live event budgeting, while keeping the practical logic that producers, promoters, production teams, PMs, freelancers and finance people already understand.
It currently covers things like:
- show setup
- box office assumptions
- expenses and committed costs
- other revenue
- management fees
- artist deal logic
- scenarios
- ticket-sales snapshots
- P&L review
- import/export
I’m not doing a big public launch. It’s in private pilot, and I’m mainly trying to find out whether this is actually useful to people who deal with event budgets in the real world.
I’ve put a short walkthrough here:
The feedback I’d really value is:
- Does this solve a real problem?
- Where does it look better than Excel?
- Where would Excel still be faster?
- What feels missing?
- What would need to be true before you’d trust something like this on a real project?
I’m not trying to spam or hard-sell anything. I’m looking for honest criticism from people who know the pain points.
Thanks in advance to anyone who takes a look.