Wedding Website Builders Compared: What Free Actually Costs

There are three ways a wedding website gets paid for: a registry cut and marketplace sales (free to you), a monthly subscription, or a single payment. Each one produces a different product, and the differences show up in exactly the places you cannot change later — how guests are addressed, what happens at the door, and who else gets to talk to your guest list.

Last updated: August 2026

Written by the makers of one of them. The comparison below says where each model wins, including where ours loses.

The three models

Registry-funded (free). Zola, The Knot and Withjoy give you the website, the RSVP and the registry at no charge; a custom domain is typically the one paid extra. They earn when your guests buy gifts and when you buy stationery. This is the mainstream free option and it is genuinely good software.

Per-send or per-guest (stationery platforms). Minted, Paperless Post and Greenvelope charge for the invitation itself — per card, per recipient, or per send. Design quality is usually the draw, and the cost scales with your guest list.

Pay once. A single flat payment for the invitation, the website and the RSVP, with the guest count irrelevant to the price. Ours is $69 for unlimited guests and 18 months online.

What does each model optimise for?

This is the useful question, because software gets built where the money is.

	Registry-funded	Per-send	Pay once
Gets better at	Registry, gifting, vendor marketplace, planning tools	Card design, print quality, premium feel	Guest list, RSVP depth, the door
Your cost at 50 guests	Free	Moderate	$69
Your cost at 600 guests	Free	High, and rising	$69
What sits in front of guests	The platform's registry and marketplace	The platform's brand	Your invitation
Incentive to grow your guest list	Neutral to positive	Positive — more guests, more revenue	Neutral
Where it stops investing	Anything not feeding the registry	Anything not on the card	Anything not about the guest list

Read the last row twice. It predicts the missing features better than any feature list does.

How to choose, in four questions

1. Do you want a registry in the same place? If yes, use a free registry-funded builder. Nothing else will match it, and paying for a website you could have had free is a bad trade. We do not have a registry; you can link your own and we take no commission, but that is not the same convenience.

2. Does the price move with your guest list? If two families are still negotiating names, a per-guest cost is a bill that grows during the argument. The per-guest pricing question in detail.

3. Does each guest need their own link? A shared URL makes every guest identify themselves before they can reply, and that is where replies leak. If your list is large or your names repeat across a family, per-guest links change the reply rate and the trustworthiness of the count.

4. Is there a door? If someone will be standing at an entrance managing who comes in, you need a pass per guest, not a website. QR entry passes and check-in.

Two yeses in questions 2–4 usually mean the free builder is not the cheapest option once you count your own time.

What "free" actually costs

Not money. Three other things, and whether they matter is genuinely personal:

• Attention. The platform markets to the people opening your invitation. That is the deal that makes it free.
• A cut of the gifts, in the sense that the registry is the revenue. Ours takes nothing from a registry you link, because we were paid at publish.
• Feature direction. Anything not connected to gifting competes for engineering time with something that is.

None of that makes free bad. It makes free specific — excellent when your wedding fits the model it was built for, and thin when it does not.

Where a subscription site builder fits

Rarely, for a wedding. A general website builder gives you total design control and charges monthly for a site you need for about a year. You will build the RSVP yourself, and per-guest addressing and door passes are not going to happen. Choose it only when the wedding site is a design project you want to do.

Frequently asked questions

Is a paid wedding website worth it if free ones exist? Only for a specific reason — guest-list depth, the door, a non-English invitation, or no third-party branding in front of guests. "Nicer designs" is not a good enough reason; the free platforms have excellent designs.

Which is cheapest for a big wedding? A flat one-time fee, once the list passes roughly 200 guests and the alternative charges per head. Below that, free is cheapest and it is not close.

Can I use two — a free website and a paid invitation? Yes, and some couples do: a free registry page, and a separate invitation that handles the RSVP and the door. It costs a little duplication and it works.

How long do these stay online? Varies, and it is worth asking before you send. Ours is 18 months from publishing. Free platforms generally keep it up while the account lives, which is a different kind of promise — better in principle, dependent on the company in practice.

Does the invitation design differ much between them? Less than the marketing suggests. Where they differ sharply is everything after the design: how the link is addressed, what the RSVP can ask, and whether anything exists for the door.

Decide before you send

Whichever model fits, decide before a single link goes out — the URL is the thing your guests keep, and moving after you have sent it is not really possible. If the job is the guest list rather than the registry, build the whole invitation free and look at it at full size before paying anything, on the wedding invitation and RSVP page.