The price you were shown and the price on your statement should be the same number. Link Invitation sets a price for each country in advance and holds it there, rather than converting a dollar figure at the moment you happen to open the page. If your currency is not one we hold a price in, you are quoted in US dollars instead, and the page says so before you pay.
Pinned prices and converted prices are not the same thing
A converted price is a single base price run through an exchange rate at the instant you look at it. Two things follow from that. The number moves when the rate moves, so the figure you screenshotted on Sunday can be a different figure on Wednesday. And the number is whatever the arithmetic produced, which is rarely a number anyone would choose to print.
A pinned price is written down per currency in advance, the way a printed price list is. It is reviewed periodically, and left alone in between. Nothing recalculates between the page, the checkout screen and the charge, because there is no calculation to run - the price for your country is simply what it is.
Why converted prices read badly
Every country has a shape that prices take. People know what a normal price looks like where they live, in the same way they know what a normal phone number looks like. Conversion ignores all of that. It hands you a figure with an awkward tail of digits that no shop in your country would put on a shelf, and you have to do a second piece of mental work just to decide whether it is a lot or a little.
That matters more than it sounds when you are planning a wedding, because you are comparing quotes. Your caterer quoted a round local number. Your venue quoted a round local number. A converted price is the only line in the spreadsheet that looks like the output of a calculator, and it is the only one you cannot hold in your head.
Because our prices are set to read normally in each market, they are not an exact conversion of any single base price. Sometimes a local price sits slightly above what a converter would say, sometimes slightly below. That is the trade: a number that behaves like a price rather than a number that tracks a rate feed.
How we decide which currency you see
The country comes from your network connection. Requests to the site arrive with a country code attached by our network provider, and that code is what selects the price list. It is not taken from a setting you filled in, and it is not taken from your billing address.
Two practical consequences are worth knowing.
- If you are connecting from another country - travelling, or living abroad and planning a wedding back home - you will see the price list for the country you are connecting from, not the one you think of as yours.
- A currency preference saved in your account changes what your planning screens display. It does not change which country’s price list you buy from. You cannot shop between markets for the cheapest one, and that is deliberate.
The checkout does not carry the number over from the page. It works the currency out again on our own servers, from the same network signal, and reads the same row of the same table, so nothing your browser sends can change what is charged. There is one case where the two screens can name different currencies: if that signal is missing altogether, the checkout quotes US dollars rather than guessing from your browser’s language setting. And if you need to be invoiced in a currency other than the one your country resolves to, we cannot do that, which is worth knowing before you start rather than at the payment screen.
When you will see US dollars
We hold pinned prices in 119 currencies, and everything outside that set is quoted and charged in US dollars. A currency lands outside it for one of three reasons.
Two of them are limits of our card processor. Stripe cannot present a currency with three decimal places, which rules out several Gulf currencies whatever we would like to do about it; most of those are pegged to the dollar anyway, so a dollar sticker at least stays still there. It also caps how large a single charge may be, which excludes a few currencies in which an ordinary price already runs to seven digits. The third reason is our own choice: in markets where local numbers move very quickly, any price we pinned would be wrong within weeks, and pretending otherwise would be worse than quoting dollars honestly.
What a pinned price does not protect you from
It is worth being plain about the edges. A pinned price does not stop your bank charging you for a cross-border transaction if you are on the dollar fallback. It does not mean the price never changes: these are sticker prices, reviewed the way any price list is reviewed, and a review can move a number. What it means is narrower and more useful than that. The price does not change between reading it and paying it, and it does not change because a rate ticked while you were deciding.
If you would rather see the whole set before you compare anything, the pricing page shows what each plan includes in whatever currency your connection resolves to.
What to check before you pay for anything digital
This is worth doing with any invitation service, not only this one. Four questions take a minute each and save the awkward conversation later.
- Is the price you are looking at a fixed local price or a live conversion. If it is a conversion, the amount you pay is not guaranteed to be the amount you read.
- Does the currency at the payment screen match the currency on the pricing page. If it changes, something is being converted somewhere.
- Is the charge one-off or recurring. A one-off fee and a monthly fee can look identical on a pricing card.
- If you are being quoted in a currency that is not yours, is that stated plainly. A quiet dollar quote is how a statement surprise starts.
Frequently asked questions
Will my bank convert the price again?
Not if you are charged in your own currency, because there is nothing left to convert. If you were quoted in US dollars because we do not hold a price in your currency, your bank converts at its own rate and may add a foreign transaction fee.
I am abroad at the moment. Which price will I see?
The one for the country you are connecting from, because the country is read from the network connection rather than from your account. The checkout uses the same signal, so the price you see is the price you pay wherever you happen to be sitting.
Why is my local price not exactly the dollar price converted?
Because it was set to be a number that reads normally in your country rather than the output of a conversion. It can sit a little above or a little below what a currency converter would tell you on any given day.
Related: Pricing