This chapter focuses on the UK’s biggest and most influential festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF), analyzing its benefits and risks. It considers some of the EFF’s advantages: the opportunities for artists to do a three-week run, to build relationships with other artists, and take part in an international hothouse for seeing work, learning, and developing. The chapter also considers the EFF’s pernicious effects: its unregulated labour conditions; environmental impact; lack of integration into Edinburgh’s year-round performance culture; economic and cultural exclusiveness; competitive individualization of success and failure; and pressures on mental health. It ends by proposing ways the EFF and its emulators could improve their social impact by investing in infrastructure, Edinburgh’s performance culture, and performance makers; actively supporting artists’ mental health; offering structural mentoring support; introducing regulations that protect workers; actively supporting more diverse makers, critics and audiences; and advocating for collaboration over competition. The chapter advocates for a vision of the fringe as, not a neo-liberal capitalist market, but a civic sphere.