Wedding website free trial: what is free and when do you pay?

Free is the most common word in this market and the least precise. Nobody is being dishonest; the offers simply stop being free at different moments, and none of the pricing pages says which moment out loud.

That matters more here than in most software decisions, because a wedding page gets built in fits and starts. You work on it for an evening, then not for six weeks, then every night for a fortnight.

"Free trial" means two different things. One is a trial with a clock: everything unlocked, but only for a set period, after which the page closes or turns into a charge. The other is a free stage with no clock — you build as long as you like and pay only for the step that reaches your guests. The difference matters because months pass between the first idea and the invitation, and a clock will run out in that time, usually while you are not working on the page. The quickest test: are payment details asked for during setup?

What a trial is for is easy to state and easy to get wrong: it is a rehearsal, not a tour. Clicking through a template gallery tells you nothing that screenshots would not have told you already.

Rehearse the part you will actually be doing at eleven at night in March, on a phone, with a half-written running order. That is where a tool turns out to be finishable by two people without help, or not.

The free stage answers one question, and it is the important one: can the two of you finish this page without help? Open the preview on a phone rather than a laptop, because that is where your guests will be. Write a real paragraph instead of placeholder text, put in the real schedule, then change something — a time, an image, the order of two sections. If that takes two minutes, the week before the wedding stays calm.

The order couples work in is almost always the same: date, guest list, wording, design, then invitations. Money is only needed at the last step, so an offer is fairly divided when all four earlier steps fit inside the free part.

Once the free part ends, you are no longer comparing prices but business models, and there are only three of them. Knowing which one you are looking at explains the price better than the number does.

What to look for is a package whose contents are stated in quantities, a free stage without a clock on it, and a term that finishes by itself rather than one somebody has to remember to stop.

As a mechanism there are three ways a wedding page is paid for, and none is dishonest. Free with something in return: you pay with advertising space, with a provider address that turns your page into a profile on their site, or with a share of what is transacted through the page. Subscription: you pay while the page is online. One-off payment: you pay for a fixed term, and the term ends.

What makes an offer expensive is rarely the price. It is three other things — limits counted in people and photos, an automatic renewal nobody watches once the celebration is over, and a missing export. A free page carrying advertising is fine while it holds a date and a location. Once replies, allergies and photographs are on it, you are comparing models rather than prices, which is what the cost comparison takes apart.

The reply route is where a free tier and a paid one stop resembling each other, and rarely because of a missing button. Free tiers cap invitations, and a cap on invitations is a cap on how many people can answer at all.

The second difference is who does the typing. Without reminders, without a resend and without a way for you to enter an answer on somebody's behalf, the work does not disappear. It moves to you.

Count this part in effort rather than money. Every reply that does not come through the page arrives as a message, a phone call or a chat in the supermarket, and has to be typed into the list by hand. Plan two rounds of reminders: the last replies land shortly before the deadline your venue sets for final numbers, so put your own a week ahead of it.

Guests without a smartphone need a second route: a printed card carrying the code, a phone number, and the ability for you to enter a reply on their behalf. Test that, because it is where RSVP tools diverge. Test as well what counts as one invitation, a household or a person — with families and children that is the difference between the right package and one a size too small. The list behind it is covered in the online guest list guide.

Assume the trial account will outlive the decision. Whatever goes in during a free stage stays in the provider's system unless you go back and remove it, and the free stage is precisely when nobody is thinking about that.

So settle one thing before uploading anything: is this the tool, or is this still a test? The two call for different data.

The concrete version of that is the import. Importing the whole guest list to try a tool puts other people's names, addresses and phone numbers into a system you have not decided on. Test with two invented guests instead, one accepting and one declining, and import the real data only once you are staying. Establish beforehand what happens to the account if you do not.

For the photo gallery this counts double: that is where pictures of children, and of guests who never agreed to be public, end up. Access through an invitation code is therefore not a convenience feature but the actual protection — the guest photo upload guide has the details.

Four questions settle a free offer, and all four can be answered before you invest an evening in the page:

• Does the free stage expire, and if so, exactly when?
• Which step costs money: publishing, inviting or uploading?
• How many people and how many photos are included?
• Does anything renew on its own?

Getting Married puts no clock on the free stage: the page can sit half-finished for a year, and money only enters at the step that reaches your guests.

Switching does not become expensive when you pay; it becomes expensive when you send. Once the first invitation is out with an address and a code on it, the decision is yours to live with, so the checking belongs before that. Walk the route yourselves once — scan the code, find the name, accept, choose a meal, read the confirmation. Whatever snags there will snag sixty times over with sixty guests.