This is more of a small in-between update than a proper big Wedding Desk post. Basically a brain fart that has been bothering me for a while.
I keep thinking about pricing from the same angle: how do I make sure people aren't paying for Wedding Desk when they're not actually using it?
Weddings make that surprisingly complicated.
The gap between booking and the wedding
You might book a wedding today that takes place six months from now. You could already collect the intake, build most of your timeline, prepare your shot list and add your notes in the first month. Depending on your plan, quite a lot of the project could already be sitting there, ready.
And then nothing.
There can easily be a three, four or five month gap before you really need to touch that wedding again.
The normal SaaS answer would be simple: keep paying every month.
I don't particularly like that answer.
Pause without starting over
If you only need Wedding Desk for one wedding, I don't think you should have to keep a subscription running for six months purely because cancelling would mean losing everything you already prepared.
So I'm looking at a different approach.
The idea is that you could use Wedding Desk normally for as long as you're subscribed. Build your project, collect information, create your timeline, prepare your shot list, write your notes, whatever is included in your plan.
Then, if the wedding is still months away, you could simply stop the subscription.
Your account would remain. Your project would remain. Your data would remain.
The details still need working out
You wouldn't be able to keep editing everything while the subscription is inactive, obviously. I'll also need to work out exactly how much project information should stay viewable, because there has to be a sensible line between keeping your data safe and accidentally creating a free version people can keep actively using forever.
But the important part is this: cancelling shouldn't automatically mean starting from zero later.
If the wedding is six months away, you might pay for Wedding Desk for a month or two, prepare everything you can, pause, and then come back closer to the wedding. Reactivate the subscription and the project is still there waiting for you.
You pay while you need the product, not because your wedding date happens to be far away.
I'm currently thinking stored projects could stay available for something like a year after cancelling, but don't pin me down on that yet. There are still technical details, storage rules and abuse cases to work through.
Another option: one-off projects
There is another option I'm thinking about as well: a one-off project purchase.
That could make a lot of sense for photographers or videographers who only shoot a handful of weddings, or somebody who simply wants Wedding Desk for one specific job without taking out another subscription.
The difficult part is pricing it properly. If it is too cheap, the subscription stops making sense. If it is too expensive, the whole point of offering it disappears. And technically it introduces another access model that needs to stay simple rather than turning the pricing system into a small accounting degree.
So that one is still very much being worked out.
The principle
But both ideas come from the same place.
I don't want Wedding Desk to become one of those subscriptions you keep paying because cancelling feels dangerous.
Use it when it helps. Stop when you don't need it. Come back when the wedding gets closer.
And ideally, all the work you already did is still sitting there.
