Surge play
Ticket onsales and exclusive drops
Onsales concentrate intentional demand into minutes. Fans refresh together; the ticketing stack cannot. TideGuard turns that spike into a fair corridor so inventory and payment only see admitted traffic.
Fairness the room can defend
Queue Mode is FIFO: join order is the admit order, with Durable Objects keeping that order consistent for a named queue. Lottery Mode draws uniformly from the current pool when equal odds matter more than position, and the room can show odds instead of a hard line number.
Either mode issues time-limited HMAC tokens on admit. Tokens expire so capacity cannot leak past your policy after someone walks away from the flow.
What visitors and operators see
Brand the waiting room to the event: colors, copy, font, and whether to show waiting depth. Demos on this site show the full-page room, an embeddable widget, and a custom API-shaped client so design and support can review the face of the queue before go-live.
Operators get live metrics, silent pause, opening time, and event-window geo gates when a sale is territory-limited. Staff bypass stays explicit via allowlist or Pass queue rather than hidden VIP cuts in the public line.
Own the room for the onsale
Commercial waiting rooms often price by seats or events. TideGuard is free software you deploy on your edge account; you estimate infrastructure with the cost calculator and keep the code.
Protect the checkout or hold paths with origin proxy, set the admit rate to what inventory and payment can survive, and open the room when the onsale starts.
Next steps
Review the waiting room demos, check capabilities, or estimate Cloudflare cost for your crowd size. Other surge shapes: retail drops, and viral launches.