Wedding invitation cost calculator

Paper invitations are priced per card and per stamp, so the bill grows with every address on the list. A digital invitation is priced once. That is the whole comparison, and it is why a single average is useless: what you pay depends on how many households you post to, not how many people you invite.

Start with the household count, because that is what you actually buy cards and stamps for. A hundred guests is rarely a hundred envelopes — couples share one, families share one, and a table of old friends might be six separate addresses. The guest number is still worth entering, because it drives the cost-per-guest line, and that is the figure that makes two differently shaped prices comparable.

The printed-card prices in the menu are not our estimates. Each was read from Zola’s or The Knot’s own pages on 15 September 2026 and each carries the quantity rule the vendor publishes with it: Zola’s 20-card minimum in increments of 10, its 50-card letterpress minimum, and The Knot’s per-card price quoted at 100 cards. So the calculator rounds your order up to the vendor’s rule rather than quietly multiplying, notes it under the total when it has, and flags The Knot’s figure when your order is smaller than the quantity it was quoted at. Two caveats travel with those numbers: Zola’s Petite and letterpress prices are the sheet’s own “from” floors rather than a finished cart, and both Knot prices are list prices — the WED30 code it was advertising at −30% that day is not applied here, because a code can lapse between our check and your visit.

Envelopes, reply cards and the two stamps are a different kind of number: nobody publishes one that fits your country and your printer, so the calculator does not pretend to. They open as round placeholders under a heading that calls them assumptions, and every line they feed is labelled the same way. Put your postal service’s current rate in before you quote the total to anyone. Postage both ways is where paper quietly doubles — the stamp on the reply card costs what the stamp on the invitation cost, and you buy one of each per household.

The digital column is one number because there is only one number: a flat price for the whole list, with no per-guest fee to grow. Invite forty people or four hundred and it does not move, which is why its cost-per-guest line keeps falling while the paper one barely shifts. Both totals leave out the printer’s shipping, sales tax, calligraphy, rush fees, thank-you cards and save-the-dates, so add your own quotes for those before the budget is final.