Why FestivalPilot? How 30 years of festivals became an app

There was one festival where my folded A4 schedule hung from a carabiner on my belt loop. By day three it had been dragged through a puddle once, hit by beer rain once and crushed in my sleep twice. It was maybe 30 percent readable. Which band was playing where? Mostly guessed from the first two letters.

That was roughly the moment when I thought: there has to be a better solution than printed schedules that get forgotten in the tent, or lineup PDFs with three parallel stages that you scroll through until the display goes dark.

Who I am

I am Thomas, I live in the Frankfurt area, I have been building websites and software for more than ten years, and I went to my first festival in the early 1990s. After a break from the late 1990s until around 2005, when I went back to Rock im Park for the first time, festivals became part of my year again. Some years that meant ten to twelve festivals.

The number 76 in the brand name seventysix is my birth year. Festivals have been the part of summer I actively plan around for more than three decades. Southside and Rock im Park are my home base. Taubertal and Highfield used to be fixed points in the calendar. Some festivals come, some go. I stay.

19 years of festivalisten.de

In 2007 we founded festivalisten.de. At its peak, we had six regular editors spending weekends on different festival fields, writing reviews, doing interviews and pushing concert photos into WordPress. Today I run the blog alone, on the side. The tone stayed the same: personal, honest, no rewritten press releases.

FestivalPilot is the next logical step from that festivalisten world. Festivalisten can explain what is happening before and after a festival. An app can do something a blog never could: accompany you through the actual festival day, when the Wi-Fi is gone, the battery is at 23 percent and two of your headliners suddenly start at the same time.

Why not just use the official festival app?

I do not particularly like most official festival apps. Some are simply not very good technically: slow loading, forgotten favourites between app starts, no proper offline mode. Others feel optimized for marketing and tracking: push notifications for merch, permissions for everything Android and iOS will allow, and of course a separate app for every single festival that you delete after three days.

What none of these apps really offer is an honest multi-festival approach. You do not only go to Wacken. You go to Wacken and Rock im Park and Hellfest. You want the data, your marked acts and clash resolution in one place.

That is the space FestivalPilot is meant to occupy.

Privacy first is not a marketing phrase

For all apps I build, the standard is the same: privacy first, GDPR-clean, you stay in control. That is not a compliance layer added at the end. It is the default setting.

In practice that means: German server infrastructure at Hetzner in Nuremberg, no US cloud, no Cloudflare in the middle, no account, no login, no profile. Tracking only happens if you actively consent during onboarding, and even then it is limited to Crashlytics and Analytics, not ad networks. Festival data and your marked acts live locally on your device. What is not collected cannot leak.

That is a deliberate decision. A festival app does not need to know who you are to tell you when your next marked band starts.

Solo, indie, no pressure

FestivalPilot is a heart project, built by one person, on the side, without venture capital, without a pitch deck and without KPI reporting for investors. The entire infrastructure costs less than 12 euros per month. That is intentional.

If someone said “sell this to Eventim for a few million”, my answer would probably be: no. That would not be the project I am building. If a few euros come in, I am happy. If it remains a tool I personally take to festivals every June, that is fine too.

Premium exists in that spirit. It supports an independent app developer, and a full season costs roughly as much as one beer or drink on the festival site.

Where things stand right now

• Android is in review at Google. I expect approval in about seven days.
• iOS submission starts today. The app needs to be live before the first big festivals of the season, otherwise the early word-of-mouth moment is gone.
• Marketing site and backend have been live since the end of April. Both run on our own Hetzner infrastructure in Nuremberg.
• Lineups currently include 916 bands with real German and English bios, Wacken is complete, and Rock am Ring and Rock im Park already have real set times.

The app is actively being developed, especially around Live Mode. The goal is not just to show a static timetable, but to help during the actual day: current slots, upcoming marked acts, clashes, reminders and practical signals when something changes.

What comes next

My dream feature as someone who has been going to festivals for more than 30 years is a festival mode that helps proactively without being bossy. Something that shows the next useful step on the festival day without optimizing the fun out of it. That is already planned and should ideally ship before June.

How quickly the app grows after that depends on how many people actually use it. My concrete goal is 1,000 installs in the first year, meaning by the end of the 2026 season. That feels realistic and ambitious at the same time. If demand is there, I will keep expanding FestivalPilot. If not, some of that time will go into Vereinsgeist or CateringBuddy. The next projects are already half waiting in the drawer.

Keep the plan dry this time

What I hope for this season is simple: you install the app, mark your bands, notice that clash detection actually helps because two favourite acts once again play at the same time, and write to me when something does not work or when a lineup is outdated. The app has a button for that, and I receive the hint directly.

If FestivalPilot replaces the printed schedule in the tent before the first rain makes it unreadable, it has done its job.

If you want to see what else I am building, remmedy is a medication reminder app for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, and Vereinsgeist is an app for clubs, teams, communication and events.

• Thomas