I sent the cheapest wedding invitations in the world

by Donna Werbner on 04 June 2010  |  6 comments
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Wedding invitations can cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds. Not for Donna Werbner though - she sent the cheapest wedding invitations in the world!

If you’re a frugal bride, there are two obvious choices when it comes to wedding invitations: buy some cheap but professionally-printed invitations off the shelf or make/print your own.

So I had a look around for some budget options from well-known retailers. The cheapest options I could find on each site are listed here:

‘Off the shelf’ options

The nice thing about Photobox and Vistaprint is that you can put a photograph of yourselves on the invitation, to make it personal.

However, there seems to be very little competition on price, and as I want a big fat wedding with hundreds of guests, £1 per invitation was going to add up to a lot.

Could I do better with by printing off/writing the invitations myself, at home?

‘Print your own’ options

As you can see, Confetti gets the award for Biggest Rip-off when it comes to wedding invitations, charging 300 times more for each wedding invitation than you would pay for practically identical cards and envelopes at the far less well-known site, liz-craft.co.uk.

The cheapest stationary offered by Marks & Spencer still seems quite expensive to me, at least it has a special design on it, which you may think is worth paying extra for.

Alternatively, and I think this is by far the best option, you could go for the cheap option from liz-craft.co.uk, and use one of these free invitation designs from wedding-invitation-ideas.com.

So what did I do?

Looking at the hundreds of pounds you could save with the last option, you might think that was frugal enough for me.

But personally, I value my time as well as my money. The idea of trying to gather everyone’s postal addresses, spending hours writing them on the envelopes and then trying to keep track of all the RSVPs filled me with dread. And of course, as well as the invitations, you have to fork out for stamps – and while 32p for each 2nd class stamp might not sound a lot, if you’re inviting lots of people, it quickly adds up.

So I decided to send what must be the cheapest wedding invitations in the world. I sent all my invitations for free - by email.

I know that, for many people, this is pretty shocking. If you think it’s important that your invitation is printed and posted, then as I said earlier, the ‘print your own option’ is a perfectly good one and will probably cost you less than £50 to send 150.

But the fact is, I hate waste - and every single wedding invitation I’ve ever received has gone in the bin after the wedding. So while I often admire how pretty these invitations are when they arrive, the only true emotion they ever inspire in me is dread: that I’ll lose the darned thing before the wedding, and won’t know when and where to show up! Plus, you can use the excuse that email invitations are good for the environment.

A warning though if you go down this route: it's probably a good idea offer to post print-outs to anyone who wants one, just in case they are not very comfortable surfing online. We did, and so far, three have been requested.

But, even though I was very happy with the idea of saving time, money and the environment by sending an email, I didn’t want my invitation to be boring and impersonal. I did want it to give a flavour of our big day, as well as ensuring my guests got all the information they needed, and ideally I also wanted an easy way of keeping track of who had accepted.

Reading this on a website, as you are, I’m sure you can guess my next thought: I decided to set up a very personal wedding website, which I could link to from all the invitation emails!

And the good news is, not only is this 100% free, even if you have never set up a website before, you’ll find it surprisingly easy. To find out more, keep an eye out for my next blog post...