Case Study: Seats.io achieves scalable, reliable realtime seat updates with Ably

Simultaneous realtime seat updates for live events ticket buyers

Seats.io is a seating chart maker that helps ticket sellers draw and edit interactive floor plans for event booking. Faced with an unsustainable in-house realtime solution—clients polling every second, delayed seat availability updates and difficulty making WebSockets work through a load balancer—Seats.io turned to Ably for a scalable realtime infrastructure using Ably’s cross-platform client libraries and realtime messaging capabilities.

Ably implemented a Pub/Sub messaging solution with guaranteed delivery/ordering, connection state recovery (up to 2 minutes), and consistent SDKs, delivered on a pay-as-you-go model. The result: near-simultaneous seat updates, reliable handling of traffic spikes, and minimal downtime; Seats.io now supports 97,605 events, 10,734,222 booked seats and 58,908 floor plans while reporting improved speed and reliability thanks to Ably.

Seats.io

Matti Roloux

CTO