How you can pay, and the refund window

You can pay by card through Stripe, or with PayPal. Your card number is typed on the payment provider’s own page rather than on ours, so we never see it and never hold it. A refund is possible right up until design work on your invitation starts, and not once it has, with the rule in full on the refund policy page rather than in a paraphrase here.

What you can pay with

A card through Stripe, or PayPal. Either way it is one payment. There is no subscription behind it, no renewal date waiting later on, and nothing to remember to cancel after the wedding.

That payment covers one invitation template. If you later want a second invitation - a separate event, or a different design for a different side of the family - that is a second payment rather than something the first one already included. Prices differ by country, so instead of printing a number that would be wrong for most people reading this, the current one where you are is on the pricing page.

You are charged in your own currency where we are able to bill it. Where we cannot, the charge is in US dollars and your bank does the conversion. That conversion fee belongs to your bank, not to us, which also makes it the one part of a payment a refund cannot give back.

Where your card details actually go

Choosing card takes you off our site and onto Stripe’s own checkout page. The number goes in there. What comes back to us is an answer - paid or not paid - and a reference for the payment. Your own card statement or PayPal record keeps a reference for the same payment, which is worth knowing because a refund request asks you for one.

This is worth understanding for a practical reason as much as a nervous one. When a card fails, it usually fails for a reason only your bank can see: a foreign charge held for review, a one-time code waiting in a banking app, a limit set years ago and forgotten. We can tell you whether the payment reached us. We cannot tell you why your bank said no, and we cannot make it say yes.

Nothing is charged while you are still deciding

Building is free. Choose a design, put your names and your date on it, add your guest list, and look at the whole thing exactly as a guest will. None of that asks for a payment method. The wall you eventually meet is publishing: a free account cannot publish an invitation. It is not a locked design and not a watermark across the preview. One other limit sits before that one - a free account holds up to 150 guests, which is enough to see how a list behaves and short of what a long family list needs.

This shapes how you should treat the refund window. If you are thinking of paying in order to find out whether the invitation is any good, do not. Preview it first, on your own phone, and on somebody else’s if you can. The window that follows a payment is not a trial period, and treating it as one is how people end up disappointed on both sides.

The refund window, and where it closes

The window closes when work starts, not on a date. There is no countdown running somewhere that you could check, which is why the question to ask is what has happened to your invitation rather than how long it has been since you paid.

The refund policy page also sets out how to ask, and it asks for a few specific things so that nobody has to go looking for your payment. Have these to hand:

• Your full name, as it is on the account.
• Which plan you paid for.
• The date of the payment.
• The payment reference.

Failed and duplicate charges are a different matter, and the window above has nothing to do with them. If the same plan was charged twice, or money left your account and your plan never activated, that is ours to sort out and it gets sorted out. Say so as soon as you notice, with the same details.

The first minute after you pay

You come back to a confirmation page that keeps checking your order until the payment is confirmed rather than congratulating you on arrival. Usually that is instant. Sometimes it takes a few seconds while the confirmation makes its way across, and the page holds rather than guessing. Once it lands, the plan is on your account and publishing is available.

Two smaller things worth knowing. A checkout page left sitting open goes stale after roughly half an hour, at which point you start it again - nothing is charged for the abandoned one. And if you close the tab halfway through, do not assume the worst and pay a second time. Go back to your dashboard and check whether the plan is already on your account before you try again.

When paying for this is not the right call

For some weddings, keeping your money is the better decision, and it is worth saying so before the charge clears rather than after.

If the invitation is an object you want to keep, print. A card in a box twenty years from now is not something a link replaces, and no payment method changes that. If a real share of your list will not open a link - the relatives whose only telephone sits in the hallway, the guests who reply by post or not at all - paying does not fix that either. A short printed run for those households, alongside links for everyone else, is the answer more often than people expect.

If a parent or a sibling is paying, have that conversation before anybody opens a checkout page rather than while one is open. And if you are simply not sure this suits your event, ask on the contact page first. Which plan covers what you actually need, whether the currency you will be charged in is the one you expect, whether a second invitation later is worth budgeting for now: none of that costs anything to ask beforehand, and all of it is harder to unpick once the money has moved.

Related: Pricing · Refund policy