How the Shortlist Works
What it's for
The Shortlist is a side-by-side comparison workspace for up to 3 events you're actively deciding between. Think of it as your "final round" — everything looks good on paper, but which three actually fit your season, your budget, and your calendar?
It's designed for planning. When decisions are made, save the picks as a snapshot (below) or clear the Working set and start the next round.
Adding events
Add any event to your Working Shortlist from three places:
The bookmark icon on Saved Events cards (My Account page)
The bookmark icon on Event detail pages when you're browsing
The + Shortlist button on Season Ledger event cards — or check any row's box and use the top action bar to batch-add multiple at once, up to the 3-cap
You can also use the + Add event button on the Shortlist page itself — it drops you into the events catalog with a sticky "Adding to Shortlist" banner active, so every event card gets a one-click add until you're done.
Three-at-a-time is a hard cap. When you've added three, the add controls go dormant until you remove one.
The timeline
The top panel plots your fixed-date events as solid colored bars across a single time window. Recurring markets (weekly farmers markets, monthly craft fairs) show as a hatched "runway" with a spine for each occurrence in that window.
Weekend shading runs behind the bars so you can see, at a glance, which weekends you're committing and which are still open.
The window auto-fits to your picks — one event in July gives you a ~2-week zoom; three events across the summer stretch you across all three months.
The numbers
Below the timeline, six curated fields line up per event:
Dates — same shape as the timeline; recurring events show their schedule prose
Booth fee — the entry-level 10×10 rate (or a starting point for tiered pricing). For recurring markets, this field can hold a per-market drop-in rate OR a season-long membership — the data doesn't distinguish. When you see "cadence varies · see ⓘ" on a recurring event, confirm the cadence with the organizer before budgeting
App fee — the application fee (usually one-time per event, per season)
Deadline — application deadline. "Passed" appears when it's behind you
Projected net — your own cost-scenario output, if you've built one. Click "+ Add scenario" to run the numbers on any event
True $/hr — projected net divided by the total hours you input in your scenario
Every number we show, we can defend. Every field we can't defend is missing, not guessed.
The summary
The bottom strip totals what makes sense to total: booth fees, app fees, projected net, and weekends occupied. Recurring events count once per event in the booth-fee total (we don't multiply — see the ⓘ next to Booth fee for why).
Saving snapshots
Once you've got a set of picks worth remembering, hit Save as… and name it ("Spring 2026 pipeline," "Craft-fair round," whatever fits). It archives to the Snapshots tab and stays there — a frozen copy of exactly what you had at save time, drift-proof against later edits to your scenarios or the event catalog.
Snapshots live in their own tab alongside your live Working set. Open any snapshot to review it read-only, Restore it to overwrite your current Working set with that snapshot's picks, or Delete when it's no longer useful. Both destructive actions confirm before running.
Use Snapshots for closed decisions ("what I picked last spring"), parallel plans ("optimistic vs conservative"), or a paper trail before you clear the Working set for the next round.
Sharing a Shortlist
Click the share link icon to copy a public URL that shows your current Working picks — no sign-in needed to view. The shared view shows the timeline and event names only; it hides booth fees, deadlines, and projected-net scenarios so you can share picks without leaking your pricing model.
A share link is not a snapshot — it's an encoding of the current three event IDs. If an event later changes name or is removed from the catalog, the share view reflects the current data. Use Save as… if you want a frozen record instead.
What the Shortlist deliberately doesn't do
It doesn't score events for you. The whole tool is designed to put the tradeoffs in front of you so you can decide.
It doesn't sync deadlines to a calendar. Use the bulk-export button on your Saved Events for that.
It doesn't auto-clear when the season ends. Snapshots preserve what you decided; the Working set is yours to clear or reuse whenever the next round starts.