PredictHQ API pricing, and an alternative for apps that show events to people

By Elliot Harris, FindLocal · Last verified November 2, 2026

We checked PredictHQ's details against their public docs on November 2, 2026. Things change, so follow the source links. FindLocal's numbers come live from our database. PredictHQ is a trademark of its owner, and this page isn't affiliated with or endorsed by them. Spotted a mistake? Email a correction.

What PredictHQ does well

PredictHQ answers a question most event APIs don’t touch: how much will this event change demand? Every event is scored. You get predicted attendance, a 0 to 100 rank (plus a local rank that compares it with other events nearby), predicted spend split across accommodation, hospitality and transportation, and impact patterns for the days before and after. You can filter and sort on all of those, so “every event within 5 km of my hotel expected to draw over 10,000 people next month” is a single query.

It also covers things that aren’t events in the ticketed sense but still move demand: school and public holidays, severe weather, airport delays, daylight-saving changes. If you run revenue management for a hotel group, staff restaurants, or plan stock for a retail chain, that’s the data you want, and there isn’t much else like it.

Where it falls short for a local discovery app

The first issue is fit. A discovery app sorts events by what a person might enjoy tonight, not by how many hotel rooms they’ll fill. In a demand model the stadium concert and the big conference matter most, and the Tuesday trivia night, the toddler storytime and the free gallery opening barely count. For a forecasting customer that’s correct. For a “what’s on near me” screen, those small events are what people come for.

The second is buying. There’s no price list. The pricing page offers a free trial with no credit card, and every plan after that goes through sales. Subscriptions are scoped to places and date ranges, and the docs say a query outside your scope returns no results rather than an error. So during a trial it’s hard to tell whether a city has no events or whether your plan just doesn’t cover it. A solo developer or a small team usually wants to see the price, pay with a card and keep building.

How FindLocal handles it

We collect events from venues’ own calendars every day: music, comedy, theater, readings, talks, classes, markets, trivia, open mics, storytimes and festivals, at big rooms and small ones. Each event has the venue and its coordinates, the start time in local time, the price as the venue wrote it, the performers on the bill, and a link to the venue’s own event page.

The key is self-serve. Sign up, verify your email and create a key, with no sales call. Prices are listed on the pricing page, and the paid row in the table above comes from the same plan list our checkout uses. Every plan covers every metro we track, so an empty result means nothing’s listed, not that you’re outside your plan.

There’s also an MCP server you can connect without talking to anyone, so Claude, Cursor or your own agent can query the same data.

What we don’t have is forecasting. There’s no attendance estimate, no impact score and no history. We keep upcoming events only.

Moving a discovery feature over

If you prototyped a “what’s on” feature on PredictHQ’s Events API, the search maps like this:

• Radius: within=10km@lat,lng becomes near=<lat>,<lng>&radius_km=10, or just city=<slug>
• Dates: active.gte / active.lte become when=weekend, when=week or when=YYYY-MM-DD
• Category: category=concerts,performing-arts becomes cat=music or cat=theater. Ours are listing categories such as comedy, literary, family and workshop, not demand categories.
• Keyword: q= works the same way, and performer= matches names on the bill

There’s no equivalent of rank or phq_attendance. Results come back in time order by default, and sort=featured puts events with their own artwork and full details first, which suits a front page better than a demand score.

Using both

The two do different jobs and fit together. A hotel or travel app might use PredictHQ to price rooms and plan staffing around the big weekends, and FindLocal to show guests what’s on near the hotel tonight. Dedupe the overlap on venue, date and title.

When to pick PredictHQ

Pick PredictHQ if your product forecasts demand, prices inventory, or plans staff and stock around events, and you can work with a sales-led contract. Pick FindLocal if you’re showing local events to people and want a key and a price you can see today.

Try the same query on FindLocal

Everything on in Denver this weekend, including the small venues and free events a forecasting dataset ranks low.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $FINDLOCAL_KEY" \
  "https://findlocal.community/api/events?city=denver&when=weekend"

No key yet? Run it in Explore to see the results and map, or use the keyless playground. Full reference: API docs · docs as Markdown for your LLM.

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