Building our own wedding planner
The existing tools weren't cutting it, so I built one.
how it started
My fiancée and I recently started planning our wedding. She’s the type A planner; I do my best.
We didn’t go looking for planning tools; they found us. Our venue / coordinator had their own portal. Our photographer had another. And then there were the apps you find when you Google “wedding planning”. Pretty quickly we were juggling multiple platforms, each covering some slice of the process but none of them talking to each other.
While my fiancée was away on a trip, I thought to myself: I’m a developer, I have some free time, how hard could it be to build one? Famous last words.
what was annoying
My first realization was that most of these tools are marketplaces first, planning tools second. Everything funnels you toward upsells and preferred vendors, which we didn’t really need since our venue included most of them.
The thing that pushed me over the edge: my fiancée found out that cash funds had some weird limitations. She’d compared the platforms herself and laid it out for me: if you used the platform they could track contributions, but they’d charge a fee per gift. If guests used Venmo instead, there was no transaction fee, but no way to track it either. You could have visibility or you (and your guests) could save money. Not both.
That felt like a solvable problem.
what I’m building
It started as something just for us. But the problems aren’t unique to us, so I made it something anyone can use.
It’s a focused planning dashboard: Next.js and React on the frontend, Supabase for auth and the database (free tier, all-in-one, perfect for a side project), deployed on Vercel. It’s got all the basics: vendor management, budgets, payment schedules, guest management, with more to come.
The cash fund piece was actually a tricky addition. The reason the big platforms can’t do what we wanted is that payment platforms like Venmo don’t readily expose transaction data outside their own ecosystem. So there was no clean way to watch for an incoming payment and attribute it to a specific guest. I worked around it: we parse the notifications we get from the platform for the sender, amount, and description, send webhooks to our service, and the registry matches the gift to a cash fund automatically. Not the most scalable, but it works, and the fees stays at zero.
The best thing: no marketplace, no upsells. Just the tool.
where it’s at
Something I’ve enjoyed about this project is using AI to move fast. Rapidly adding features, refactoring components as patterns took shape, drafting schema migrations, iterating on UI. Things that used to eat a whole afternoon now take an hour. The feedback loop is tight in a way it hasn’t been for my side projects before, which matters more than usual here, because there’s an actual deadline.
It’s still pretty rough, but I’ve been enjoying the process and hope to write more as it matures. My current benchmark: whether my fiancée will actually use it for more than just the cash fund registry. If she doesn’t, I’ve essentially built a side project to avoid using someone else’s side project (turned business). Which might be the most developer thing I’ve ever done.