Digital wedding invitations in Australia

This is the question that decides the choice for a lot of Australian couples, so here is the straight version. Before you publish, we count the people who open the link you shared and how many times each of them came back — you see “six people have opened your invitation”, not six names, and nothing is sent to your guests to make that count happen. Once you publish, the counter stops and the honest answer becomes no: there are no read receipts and no delivery confirmations, because we never send anything on your behalf. You share the link yourself, which is also why you always know exactly who received it.

What replaces the read receipt is the reply. Every yes, every no, every dietary note and every message lands in your dashboard the moment a guest taps, and you compare that against your own list. In practice that is the number a caterer asks for anyway: a guest who opened the invitation four times and never replied is not a headcount.

The platforms that genuinely do report opens are the ones that email or text each guest themselves — and that is where Australia runs into a wall. Of the five platforms in the table below, three restrict their own texting to North American numbers: Paperless Post, Bliss & Bone and Evite. Greenvelope says its texting covers “supported countries” without naming them. So an Australian couple ends up on the shareable-link route by default, and on Evite that is precisely the route its own help pages say costs read receipts and link guests do not appear on the guest list until they RSVP. The read receipt you were choosing them for is the first thing the Australian workaround takes away.

The useful way to think about it: decide whether you want a delivery report or a reply. If it is a delivery report, use a platform that sends on your behalf and check first that it can reach an Australian mobile. If it is a reply — and for a wedding it nearly always is — send the link yourself and chase the names still missing from the dashboard a week after your RSVP date. More on that in when to send digital wedding invitations.

One link, sent by you, down a list sorted by whichever channel each household actually uses. iMessage and SMS for the aunties, a family group chat for the cousins, WhatsApp for relatives overseas, email for the colleagues who never read a text. The link unfurls into a preview card in all of them, so what arrives looks like an invitation rather than a naked URL, and no guest installs anything or creates an account to open it.

Two things are worth setting up before you send. The first is the time zone. Our add-to-calendar button writes the clock time your invitation prints, with no zone attached, so a 4pm ceremony saves as 4pm on a phone in Perth or Brisbane instead of being quietly shifted. That is the right behaviour — nothing moves without you — but it means you should write the zone on the invitation when your list is spread out, because Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not put their clocks forward while New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT do. One line on the page settles it for every guest and every calendar: “4pm AEDT” if the wedding falls between early October and early April, “4pm AEST” outside that window — and the local set in the west and centre, AWST in Perth, ACST in Darwin, ACST or ACDT in Adelaide.

The second is the QR code, which earns its keep here more than in most markets. A wedding with a Perth contingent and a Sydney ceremony usually involves a handful of older relatives who will never tap a link; print ten cards for those households with the RSVP QR code on them and the web address written out in full beside it, and take their answers over the phone into the same dashboard as everyone else. The wedding RSVP QR code page generates it, and how to send wedding invitations online covers the channel-by-channel version.

Six to eight weeks before the wedding for the invitation itself, and the RSVP date three to four weeks before the day — set from the date your caterer needs final numbers, not from a round number that looks tidy. Where Australia differs is the save the date. When a real share of your list is flying from Perth, Darwin or New Zealand, or when the wedding falls anywhere near Christmas and January, six to eight months is not early: it is the difference between a cousin booking a flight and a cousin sending an apology.

A digital save the date is the cheapest way to buy that time, which is why ours is a separate 28 AUD product rather than a feature of the invitation — the names, the date, the city and an add-to-calendar button, sent the week you book the venue. The detail comes later on the full invitation. Digital save the dates covers it, and when to send save the dates has the timing by wedding type.

On 15 September 2026we opened each platform's own pricing and help pages and wrote down how they charge, what one invitation to a hundred guests comes to, which countries their texting reaches, whether they report who opened an invitation and whether the envelope animation is included or a paid upgrade. Where a page did not state something we wrote “not verified” rather than estimating it, and every page we read is linked under the table.

Wedvite wrote this page and is one of the rows in the table, so read it with that in mind — and note what our row concedes: no custom domain, no read receipts once you publish, and nothing sent to your guests on your behalf. The head-to-heads are on the compare hub, the wider round-up is best digital wedding invitations, the American edition of this page is digital wedding invitations, and what couples ask us most is on the FAQ.