Unlimited guests on both paid plans

A longer guest list does not cost more here. Both paid plans carry unlimited guests, so a list of two hundred and a list of eight hundred are priced the same. Free accounts are the exception: they stop at 150 guests. What follows is about the planning that changes when the number of people is no longer a line on an invoice.

Per-guest pricing makes you edit the list to fit the bill

The trouble with paying by the head, or by band, is not really the money. It is that a price gets attached to a person, and then you find yourself doing arithmetic you would rather not be doing. Your mother asks whether her friend from church can come. Under a fixed price that is an ordinary family question with an ordinary family answer. Under per-guest pricing there is a second question sitting underneath it, and you can hear yourself calculating.

Bands are the worse version, because the cost does not rise gently. It arrives as a step. You settle just below a boundary, and every further name pushes you into the next tier, so the last four people on your list cost more than the first hundred. Nobody plans a wedding hoping to think this way. It happens anyway.

• The cousin who replies for four people, and suddenly you are counting billable seats rather than chairs.
• The colleagues you were unsure about, cut not because you decided against them but because they crossed a boundary.
• Children, who count the same as adults on a head count no matter how small they are.
• The ten names your father remembers in week three, which now need a payment before they can be added.

The only guest cap sits on free accounts

Free accounts stop at 150 guests. Both paid plans have no cap at all: add as many guests as your celebration has people, and the price does not move. The difference between the two paid plans is about the design, not about the size of your list.

There is something more useful to know about the free account than its cap. Free is where you build the invitation and look at it. Publishing it, so that guests can open their own links, is the paid step. So the 150 is really a ceiling on how much of your list you can load in while you are still deciding, rather than a plan anyone could run a wedding on.

Your list will grow after you think it is finished

Treat the first version of your guest list as a draft, because it is. Names arrive from both sets of parents. A guest you invited alone turns out to have a partner. Someone you assumed would never travel decides to travel. The safe assumption is that the list you write in the first month is not the list you send.

That matters for pricing because the growth arrives late, when you have the least appetite for another decision. You are already redrawing the seating plan around three neighbours your aunt passed on this morning. Putting those three into the list should be three lines of typing, and nothing else.

It also changes how you build the list. When adding a guest is free, you put a name in as soon as you hear it and sort out the phone number later. When it costs, you keep uncertain names in a separate note until you are sure, and that note is where guests get forgotten.

What a fixed price does not make free

Unlimited guests removes one cost. It does not remove the others, and it would be dishonest to let you think a long list is no work.

• Adding guests is typing. Contacts cannot be pulled across from your phone, and there is no file to upload for now, so every name and number arrives through the keyboard, in batches rather than in one import. CSV runs the other way only, out to the caterer or the venue.
• Sending is one guest at a time. It opens one WhatsApp chat per guest, one tap each. A list of four hundred is four hundred taps, done in one sitting or spread across an evening.
• Every extra guest still costs you elsewhere. A seat, a meal, a place at a table. The invitation is usually the cheapest line on the whole budget, which is exactly why it should not be the thing that decides who comes.
• Chasing non-replies scales with the list. Two hundred guests means more people to follow up than eighty, whatever the invitation itself cost.

When you do not need any of this

If you are inviting twenty-five people and they are all in a group chat you already have open, a message with the date, the place and the time will do the job. A guest list tool starts to pay for itself once you can no longer hold the replies in your head, or once different people are invited to different events. Under that, the tool creates admin rather than removing it.

The same goes for numbers that will not move. If your list is small and settled, its size was never going to be the expensive part of your planning, and unlimited guests is not a reason to choose anything. The couples this matters most to are the ones with a list that keeps growing, and families who would rather not be asked to justify a name.

Related: Pricing · Guest list manager