Bachelorette party invitations, with the cost said up front

Readers land here meaning one of three different events, and the invitations are not interchangeable. The difference that matters is not the vibe — it is who is on the list, who hosts, and who pays.

• Bachelorette party — the bride’s friends and the wedding party, hosted by the maid of honour, guests paying their own way. An evening, a day or a weekend away. Gifts are not a thing. This page.
• Bridal shower — a wider, often older, often family guest list, hosted and paid for by whoever throws it — a mother, an aunt, a group of friends — and guests bring gifts. A daytime event, at somebody’s home or a restaurant. The invitation asks for a reply and never for money, which makes it a completely different piece of writing.
• Engagement party — everybody, both sides, hosted and paid for by the couple or their parents, usually soon after the proposal.

So the test is simple: if your invitation has to name a figure, you are writing a bachelorette invitation. If it has to name a gift registry, you are writing a shower one. And if it is going to both families at once, you want engagement party invitations instead — a mixed guest list, a host who pays, and no per-person share to explain.

One overlap worth planning for: many guests get all three, plus the wedding itself. If your dates fall in the same season as the wedding, the couple’s save the date should already be out, so people are budgeting for two trips rather than being surprised by the second one.

This is the real job, and it is two jobs rather than one. Replies tell you how big to book; money pays for it. Run them separately and both work. Run them in a single group chat and neither does.

• Send it to each person, not to the chat — an invitation dropped into a group of fourteen is addressed to nobody, so nobody answers it. One message per guest, with her name in it, gets replies the same evening.
• Ask for a deposit before the balance — a small amount against a real booking deadline is what converts a maybe into a yes. The balance can wait until a few weeks out.
• One person, one number, one request per guest — individual payment requests through a payments app, not a total posted in the chat for people to divide themselves.
• Keep the ledger private — one note of who has paid what, shared with no one. A public tally is a way of naming the person who is late.
• Chase once, by name, in private — a single direct message beats four reminders to everyone. Set the reply-by date a fortnight before your booking deadline so there is room for that message.
• Start the group chat after the yeses — and only with the people who are coming. A chat created at invitation time turns planning into a debate and leaves the guests who said no reading about it.

Be careful with what a reply form can and cannot do, because it is where hosts lose a week. A form collects answers: who is coming, their name, what they eat, whether they need a bed, whether they need a lift. It does not move money, and nothing that claims to do both tends to do both well. Take the payments through a payments app and let the form do the counting — the two lists reconcile in a minute once a week.

The same thinking is what makes the couple’s own invitation worth getting right, and it is a different problem: dozens of households, a reply-by date months out, and answers that must not end up in four places. That is what Wedvite is — an invitation that collects its own replies: one link, the invitation and its reply form on the same page, and the answers landing in one list. The reply form asks whether each guest is attending, names the people in their party, and — when the couple turn the fields on — collects dietary needs, whether they need transport and whether they need accommodation, which are exactly the three that otherwise arrive as messages. It is one price paid once, not per guest, with no limit on how many people you send it to: $49 at checkout today with SUMMER45 applied automatically until Oct 31, against a list price of $89. It stays live through your wedding date and at least 90 days after, and if a detail moves you change it on the page rather than reprinting anything.

Wedvite's list price is $89. Until Oct 31, this code brings it to $49, applied automatically at checkout:SUMMER45

Two more things worth reading before you send either one. The invitation template gallery shows what the couple’s design will look like, and how to address wedding invitations covers the message that carries a link — one per household, naming the people you are actually asking, which is the same discipline that gets a bachelorette invitation answered.