Feature image via Shutterstock.

I imagine planning and executing a wedding is a lot like DMing a party of 80 people: difficult, stressful, time-consuming.

Enter technology. Weddings must have been so hard to plan in the days of physical RSVP cards. I personally can’t imagine planning anything without spreadsheets that calculate things for you, without digital registries. Here’s some wedding tech to help you plan your big gay wedding!

Planning

Trello

Need to make collaborative checklists and brainstorming sessions with your partner? Need to keep organized in a way that both of you can see and update instantly? Need notifications when someone adds or completes a task? Trello is here to save us all. The free version is all you’re gonna need—you can even attach images and receipts and such, up to 10mb. You can use it in your browser or on iOS and Android.

Wunderlist

Need the same sort of thing, but with reminders? Wunderlist has your back. Once again, you really should only need the free account (but Pro is $5 a month, should you find it necessary). You can download Wunderlist onto practically everything.

Budgeting

Make Your Own Spreadsheet!

I’m a huge nerd and I’m all about budget, so I’d probably make a spreadsheet from scratch in Numbers. Each subcategory would have its own sheet that added together on a bigger sheet and every line item would have a person who was responsible for paying it, which would be listed on a whole separate sheet that synced up with the others. It would even have inspirational photos at the top of every page, so it would look less stark. This is my brand of nerd, and it might be yours too. You’ll know your budget inside out if you do it this way.

If this isn’t your brand of nerd and you still want to do a spreadsheet, A Practical Wedding has a Google drive one you can use (along with kickass example wedding budgets from real people).

WeddingHappy

WeddingHappy is an app that does…well, a lot of different things. But I’m putting it here in budgeting because it has a handy “amount left in budget” feature right at the top, so you can keep track of your spending. You can also add vendor contact info and get reminders when you have a payment coming up, which is better than my method of, “hey, I think we owe the photographer something right about now, I will email her and find out what that is.” It also does planning tasks, just FYI. It’s free for iOS.

Guest Management

Moo

A great way to make your Save the Dates and invitations. Just upload your design to Moo and in no time at all, Moo will send you beautiful cards. I feel like everyone knows about Moo as a business card printing service, but they also do postcards. Really lovely ones at that. This is my PSA—Moo can also print invitations, and their webapp is really easy to use.

RSVPify

RSVPify does away with paper RSVP cards that your guests have to mail back—instead, they go online, fill out a form and bam! Done! You can also create custom questions to ask your guests, like what flavor pie they prefer. Pay $30 and use it for the whole wedding. Word to the wise, some of guests with older browsers will have trouble using the form embedded on the wedding website, but that can be fixed by putting a link to your RSVPify page at the bottom, in case they couldn’t use the form. Oh, and speaking of a wedding website—

WordPress

If you want cheapest, easiest way to put together a wedding website with all the info about the wedding in one place, that solution is WordPress. Use WordPress.com for free if you don’t mind having a URL that looks like [yournames].wordpress.com. If you’re me and you eat domain names like potato chips, you can whip one up really easily for really cheap using WordPress.org! WordPress is well-documented either way, so it’s easy to figure out with a little bit of Googling and help from the WordPress Codex. Communicating with guests via the website is easy and efficient. Add a little Google map to your venue so no one gets lost!

All Seated

All Seated lets you not only manage guest lists, but also lets you handle seating charts and floor plans. The homepage says it’s free forever, and if you’re assigning individual seats, I’d take a look at it. This could’ve also easily gone up in planning, because the ability to create side-by-side timelines to make sure day-of scheduling goes as planned for each person involved is pretty awesome as well.

Glö

This is a combination wedding website maker, digital invitation provider and RSVP tracker, so if you want to replace all these tools with one tool, Glö is the way to go. They even have an option for matching paper invites if you’re a stationary person like me and can’t bear the thought of going paperless. The only catch with Glö is the price—the light package is $20 a month or $75 per year, with prices going up from there. I would be able to do all of what Glö does for much cheaper, using a bit of my own coding know-how. But that would mean I’d have to deal with a lot of disparate, moving parts (and dig deep for long forgotten PHP knowledge). If you’d prefer not to spend your time that way and have the dollars to spare, Glö might be for you.

Day Of

If you’ve gotta take photos at the reception part of it, fair enough. Check these out.

What about you? What technology did you use to plan your big queer wedding?

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