FringePlan: Planning the Edinburgh Fringe When the Official App Isn't Enough

Every August, Edinburgh turns into a city-sized spreadsheet problem. Thousands of shows, hundreds of venues, and a few precious days to see as much as you can without sprinting across town or double-booking yourself. I built FringePlan because that problem deserved a proper tool — and because the official Fringe experience still doesn't give you one.

Why build another Fringe planner?

The short answer: the official Fringe app is quite bad, and for some reason it's still unavailable (or reinvented) when you actually need it. They change it each year. New branding, new layouts, new ways to lose your wishlist. Features that worked last August vanish; things that should be basic — a conflict-aware calendar, travel between venues, a plan you can share with friends — stay half-baked or missing.

So you end up in the same place every year: a phone full of edfringe.com tabs, a Notes app graveyard of titles you meant to book, and a vague hope that the show in New Town and the one in the Meadows somehow leave you twenty minutes to walk, buy a drink, and find the right door.

I wanted something that stayed put. Paste a show URL, get the times and venue, drop it on a calendar that actually notices clashes, and generate schedules that respect how long it takes to get from A to B. Free, forever, no ticket markups. That's fringeplan.com.

How hard Fringe planning actually is

On paper it sounds simple: pick shows, put them in order. In practice it's a constraint puzzle.

Shows run multiple times across the festival. Your must-sees clash on the only day you're free. Venue A finishes at 14:00 and Venue B starts at 14:15 — on the map that looks fine until you remember they're twenty minutes apart on foot, plus queue time, plus the inevitable wrong staircase. You want lunch. You want a buffer. You want to lock the tickets you've already bought so the rest of the plan rearranges around them, not through them.

Do that for thirty shortlisted shows across a week and your brain gives up. Spreadsheets help until the first venue change. Colour-coded calendars help until someone asks "can we fit one more comedy at 19:00?" and you have to recompute everything by hand.

FringePlan exists for that moment.

What FringePlan does

Import from edfringe.com

Paste any show URL (or bulk-add a list of them). FringePlan scrapes the public listing and pulls title, venue, image, and performance times automatically — no hand-typing a three-week run of matinees.

Planning list and watch list

Mark shows you're going to see, or park ones you're still deciding on. Star must-sees, note when tickets are bought, keep a shortlist that the planner treats as higher priority.

Your dates, your calendar

Set arrival and departure once. The day-by-day calendar focuses on the days you're actually in town, with venues and start times at a glance. Overlapping performances are flagged so you can fix clashes before you commit.

Schedule planner (the real workhorse)

This is where the hard part lives. You generate proposals — day-by-day programmes that pick one performance per show, honour locks, leave room for meals and breaks, and score options with real travel time between venues.

Travel isn't a flat "15 minutes everywhere" guess. FringePlan builds walk and drive matrices from venue coordinates (OSRM routing where available, haversine estimates as fallback), then layers on:

• Travel mode — walk or taxi/drive
• Padding — extra minutes after travel for queues and finding the door
• Same-venue preference — fewer hops across town when you opt in
• Hotel / base — start- and end-of-day legs to and from where you're staying
• Tight-leg warnings — when the gap between shows is barely enough for the mapped travel time

Locked slots (tickets bought, must-see at a fixed time) stay put. Everything else can be regenerated. If a show won't fit, you get a reason — and options to swap unlocked shows out of the way.

You can keep multiple proposals side by side: one walking-heavy, one taxi-friendly, one with a longer lunch buffer. Compare, tweak, lock, regenerate.

Share and export

Create a private share link so friends can browse what you're planning without an account. Export proposals as iCal or Markdown when you want the schedule on your phone or in a notes doc.

Free

No subscriptions, no ticket markups, no hidden fees. Independent fan project — not affiliated with the Fringe Society — with show data from public listings. Always double-check times and tickets on edfringe.com before you book.

The Fringe is a logistics problem. Treat it like one.

The official app will keep changing. Listings will keep multiplying. The walk from the Pleasance to the Traverse will stay exactly as long as it is.

FringePlan won't solve "which comedy should I see" — that's still on you and your friends. It will solve "can I actually get there," "do these two clash," and "what does my week look like if I lock these six tickets and ask the planner to fill the gaps."

If you're heading to Edinburgh this year (or next), try it: fringeplan.com. Paste a few show links, set your dates, and generate a proposal with travel times turned on. That first time a clash or a tight walk shows up before you've bought the wrong ticket is the whole point.