Are free wedding websites
really free?

The biggest names in wedding websites — the registry-first platforms — genuinely let you build and publish a site for nothing. They can afford to because the site is a storefront: the registry attached to it earns a commission on gifts, and some platforms also show advertising to you or your guests. There is nothing wrong with this trade, but it is a trade. Your guest list is the audience being monetised, and the free site exists to gather it.

If you plan to use a cash fund or an external registry, check what the platform charges on top — processing fees on gift funds are where 'free' quietly ends on several large platforms. The pattern to recognise: the more insistently the registry is promoted inside the free product, the more the registry is the product.

The second model looks generous until you read the clock. Everything is open, no card required — for seven, fourteen or thirty days. Then the site, the RSVP list and sometimes your own planning data go behind a subscription, all at once. The problem is not the price; it is the timing. Weddings are planned over months, and a countdown that started the day you signed up expires long before your guests ever see the invitation.

If a tool offers a time-limited trial and nothing free after it, the practical question is: what exactly locks on the last day? If the answer includes things you made — your guest list, your seating plan, your notes — you are not trying a product, you are lending it your data.

Vowly Event runs the third model, and we would rather describe it precisely than generously. The planning side is free with no time limit and no card: unlimited events, the budget tracker, the drag-and-drop seating plan, menu and dietary planning, the music playlist, day-of timeline, task checklist, gift list, your guest list, and the invitation design itself with all 40 themes. None of that expires.

What costs money is the guest-facing side: publishing your invitation link, emailing invitations, seeing RSVP replies in detail, the guest portal, guest photo uploads and the printable QR code — €7.99 a month or €39.99 a year (the yearly plan saves 58%). There is no registry commission and no advertising anywhere in the product; the subscription is the entire business model, which is why the free side can stay genuinely free.

Whatever you choose, ask: what happens on the day my guests open the link? On commission-funded platforms, they meet a registry. On trial-based tools, they meet whatever is left after the countdown. On Vowly Event, they meet your invitation — if you have subscribed — and your planning stays yours for nothing, forever, either way. A 14-day trial of the paid side lets you publish and collect real replies before deciding; when it ends, nothing is deleted and the app does not lock. That is the whole deal, in one paragraph, and we are happy for you to compare it sentence by sentence.