The Patron's FAQ

A patron's companion app for Renaissance faires, built to work where phone signal does not. Five tools: the Herald (the faire's welcome page), a hand-drawn village map with every booth pinned, the stage schedule with offline reminders, My Pouch (your private "come back for this" list), and Merchant's Row, a faire-wide search for who sells what.

Yes. Offline is the founding requirement, not a bonus feature. Faires are held in woods and fields where coverage dies, so the app keeps everything it needs on your phone: the map is artwork stored in the app, not tiles from a server, and the schedule, directory, pouch, and reminders all read from a local database. Open the app on wifi the morning of the faire and you are set for the day. Airplane mode is a perfectly good way to save battery; the app will not notice.

No. There is nothing to sign up for, no email to hand over, and no password to forget. Your pouch, reminders, and chosen faire live on your device and stay there.

A faire we have mapped end to end: original hand-drawn artwork, every shoppe and stage pinned as faithfully as we can chart them from the information the faire makes available, and the real posted schedule seeded and refreshed through the season. Charted Faires wear a gold crest on the picker map. We chart more every season, and the picker also lists hundreds of directory faires with dates, address, and website, so yours is findable even before it is charted. Our maps are in beta: hand-drawn, still simple, and improving through 2027.

We place every shop as close to its real spot as we can, but a shop's card only fills in with its story, wares, and links once the vendor or entertainer signs up for a vendor account and adds them. Until then the card shows little more than the shop's name. If it's one of your favorites, let them know about us!

Find it on the picker map and tap "notify me" on its card. Every tap is a vote: that tally is genuinely the list we work from when choosing what to chart next. If you help run a faire, skip the line and write to us directly; faires that ask get charted fastest.

Two ways. On the Map tab, open the Directory and search by name; picking a shop flies the map straight to its pin and the pin stays lit so you can walk to it. Or, if you know what you want but not who sells it, open Merchant's Row and search the ware itself ("bodice", "dice", "mead"); every merchant that carries it appears, each one a tap away from its spot on the map.

On purpose. The map opens showing landmarks (stages, gates, and anchor points) so you can get your bearings without four hundred pins shouting at once. Use the category chips to reveal what you are hunting, zoom in for full lane-by-lane detail, or search the Directory by name. The landmark view is free; the chips and the Directory open with a season pass.

The faire map is a hand-drawn chart, not a GPS map, and it does no tracking. Location is used for exactly one thing: when you open the app, it checks, on your device, whether you are standing near a Charted Faire so it can open the right one. You can decline and pick by hand.

Please do! The maps are charted by hand and a faire's lanes shift a little every season. Write to support@eventcompassapp.com with the faire, the shop, and where it truly stands, and we will set it right for everyone. Corrections reach the app without an update.

Tap the bell on any show and choose a 15 or 30 minute warning (bells open with a season pass; the schedule itself is free to read). The alarm is scheduled on the phone itself, the same mechanism as your morning alarm, so it rings in a dead zone. Allow notifications when the app asks, or the bells have nothing to ring.

We carry the schedule the faire posts, and faires post on their own rhythm, often weekend by weekend. A weekend's lineup appears once the faire publishes it, usually mid-week. Between postings a stage may honestly show nothing rather than last weekend's acts, and a last-minute change the faire doesn't post won't show in the app.

Nobody, including us. The pouch lives only on your phone. There is no account and no cloud copy; deleting the app deletes the pouch. It is nobody's business but thine. The pouch opens with a season pass, and what you saved stays yours after the faire closes.

The Herald, the landmark map, the posted schedule, and the nationwide faire picker are free at every faire. A season pass, bought once per faire per season through your app store, unlocks the full map with every charted booth, directory search and fly-to-booth, stage reminders, the season's schedule archive, your pouch, Merchant's Row, faire-day weather in the Herald, and mark-thy-carriage, and removes the vendor promo banner at the top of the screen. What you buy stays yours: a season you have paid for remains open to revisit after the faire closes. Visit several faires a year? The Sovereign's Pass unlocks every Charted Faire annually (a founding price through December 2026; $25 from January). Current prices live on the pricing page, and the demo faire is always free to wander end to end.

No, and that is deliberate. Menus and wares are display-only, with no prices and no checkout. Every purchase happens at the booth, face to face with the artisan. The only thing ever sold in the app is the app's own pass, which unlocks features in the app and is not a faire ticket or admission of any kind.

No third-party ads, ever. The free tier shows a small promo banner for real vendors at real faires, the same folk whose booths are on the map, and the pass removes it entirely. Nothing about you is tracked or sold to anyone.

Unless it is expressly stated, no. Event Compass is an independent, unofficial companion made by people who love faires. "Charted" means we mapped it to the best of our ability from the information the faire makes available, not that the faire endorses us. Faires that would like to author their own Herald can work with us directly.

Android is first through the gates, and the iPhone version follows. Write to support@eventcompassapp.com and we will let you know the moment it is out.

There is: a free vendor portal where you claim your shoppe, tell its story, and list your wares so patrons can find you. The Vendor FAQ explains it all.