In the last post I said the timeline work had got me thinking about pricing. That thinking turned into a lot more than I expected. A couple of weeks of it, if I am honest, including some evenings where I was clearly not thinking about pricing so much as staring at it. So this post is where I landed and how I got there, because the how is more useful than the what.
The honest starting point is that I built too much.
I started building, and then I did not really stop. Free time, working time, evenings, weekends and all the small gaps in a day where a normal person does something sensible. Wedding Desk pulled me in and kept pulling. And the strange part is that I do not regret most of it. I still think almost every feature I have added will earn its place in the end. All of it fits the picture I have of what Wedding Desk should eventually be. The features were never really the issue. What tripped me up was a quiet assumption I had been carrying the whole time without examining it: that all of it had to live in one single package.
Once I actually looked at that assumption, it did not hold up.
Where this clashed with what I believe
The assumption ran straight into something I care about more than I sometimes admit.
I do not like software that keeps you slightly confused about what you are paying for. You know the feeling. A plan for every type of user, and somehow the plan that is supposedly meant for you is always missing the one thing you actually need, so you get nudged towards the tier above it. A module here. An add-on there. An upgrade prompt every time you click something slightly ambitious. It works as a business model, clearly, because a lot of companies do it. It just leaves you never quite sure what you bought.
I have written about this before, in other places, and I meant it then. I am not going to build the thing I complain about.
So on one side I had that. Keep it simple, keep it fair, do not turn Wedding Desk into a maze of tiers designed to extract another few euros a month. On the other side I had a product that had genuinely grown too large to sell as one flat thing to everyone. After a lot of reading, a lot of thinking and a couple of those staring evenings, I had to accept that I could not keep it as one package either. Both of those things were true at once, and I had to find a shape that respected both.
Solo and Team were already clear to me
Part of the answer I had worked out fairly early.
There needed to be a Solo version and a Team version. Solo is for the wedding shooter working on their own, which is most people who do this. Team is the same thing, plus everything that only makes sense once more than one person is involved on the day. A shared timeline that everyone works from. Changes that appear for the whole crew the moment someone makes them. Deciding who is allowed to see and change what. Handing a vendor or a client limited access when that actually helps.
Keeping those two apart made sense to me quickly, for a simple reason. A solo shooter has no use at all for team features. If I put all of that in front of them, they would just be looking at buttons and settings they are never going to touch, wondering whether they are missing something or paying for something they do not understand. That is exactly the confusion I said I wanted to avoid.
There is a practical side too. The Team version is a genuinely heavier piece of software. Several people editing the same wedding at the same time, live, without stepping on each other, is a hard thing to get right. It is far from finished. It needs a lot more work, and once it exists it will need more support and more fixing, because anything with real-time collaboration in it simply breaks in more interesting ways. All of that costs time, and it will have to cost more as a plan because of it. I did not want to push any of that onto the solo shooter. Not in the interface they look at every day, and not in the price they pay.
The part I kept building past
What took me much longer to notice was smaller and, in hindsight, more obvious.
I kept reading. Photography forums, Reddit threads, the places where wedding photographers and videographers actually talk about their work instead of marketing it. And I kept thinking back to the weddings I helped shoot myself. At the time I was not really thinking about planning software at all. I was just trying to keep up, get the shots, not miss anything. It was only afterwards, looking back, that I understood how much of the pressure on the day came down to preparation, or the lack of it.
What came through, again and again, is that a lot of shooters do not want a full workflow tool. They want a timeline they can fill in that actually works on the wedding day. And that last part, the working on the day, is usually where everything falls apart. Most of them have nothing that really works while they are shooting. They have a document somewhere, screenshots on their phone, a few notes, messages they sent to themselves the night before, maybe an email thread with the coordinator. It functions right up until the moment it does not, which tends to be the moment they are busiest.
Nobody using Wedding Desk should open the version meant for them and slowly realise it was designed to leave one thing out.
Around that timeline, two more things belong. A shot list, so the important frames do not slip through. A gear list, so nothing critical stays in the car. That is roughly the whole job for a large group of people.
These are shooters who are either not interested in a full intake process and a delivery flow, or already have software they like for that side and have no reason to change. And here it helps to be clear about what Wedding Desk is. It was never going to be your editing tool. The delivery side stays deliberately light, more about knowing how ready things are than actually doing the handover. The intake, the calculator, the notes, all the things I have been building on top, they are genuinely useful, and I am proud of them. But plenty of people simply do not need them. I do not want to wave those features in the face of someone who came for a timeline, and I really do not want to get in the way of a workflow that is already working fine for them.
So the simple version became the first one
That is how the stripped-back version stopped being a smaller idea sitting to one side and became the first thing I am actually shipping.
It is called Wedding Desk Go. The name is maybe a little corny, but it was the best I could come up with, and it says exactly what it is. A shot list and a gear list all come together in the timeline, ready on your phone the moment the day starts. You build your plan and you go. That is the entire idea, and I think there is real value in it being that small. It is planned at $19 a month.
Charging more than that for it would not have sat right with me. It would be strange to price a deliberately focused version the same as the fuller ones just because I could. So Go is the entry point, and it is priced like one.
From there it builds up rather than branching sideways. Wedding Desk Solo, at $29, includes everything in Go and adds the client intake and questions, the project overview that shows you what is ready and what is still missing, notes, contacts and locations, delivery preparation, and the calculator with packages, quotes and invoices. Wedding Desk Team, at $59, includes everything in Solo and adds working together with a crew on top of that. Each plan contains the whole of the one before it. There are no paid extras bolted onto the side, no single feature held back to force an upgrade, and annual billing gives you a month free.
That structure matters to me as much as the prices do. Every plan is complete on its own terms. The choice is only how far up the same product you need to go, and you can always see the full picture while you decide.
What goes where, and where I actually want your help
I spent a long time puzzling over which feature belongs in which plan. That was harder than deciding there should be three plans at all. It is easy to draw the lines in a way that looks tidy and turns out to be annoying in practice. I think I have landed somewhere close to right, but I am genuinely not certain, and I am not going to pretend otherwise by writing the whole comparison out here as though it were settled.
The pricing page lays it out plan by plan, so you can see exactly what sits where:
https://weddingdesk.app/pricing
And this is the part I mean most sincerely. If you look at that and think something is in the wrong plan, or belongs a tier lower, or should not be split the way I split it, tell me. This is new territory for me too. I would much rather get these lines right together with the people who are going to live inside the software than decide them alone at a desk and defend them afterwards. Wedding Desk is being built around what shooters actually do, and pricing is part of that, not separate from it.
Why starting small matters to me
There is one more reason Go exists, and money is only part of it.
I am doing everything I can to keep Wedding Desk simple, but I have to be honest that the full version is going to have a lot in it. There is a learning curve you cannot completely design away once a tool does this many things. Even at its simplest, the first time you open it, a fair amount comes at you at once.
Go is my answer to that. It lets you start calm. Underneath, it is really only a handful of pages where you actually do something, and once you are in it, it is not complicated. You prepare your timeline, your shots and your gear, and you use that same plan on the day. That is a complete, useful thing on its own, and for a lot of people it may be all they ever want.
And if it is not, the path is there when you are ready for it. Maybe after a season you decide you want the intake instead of the questionnaire you cobbled together in Google Docs. Maybe you start booking enough that the calculator and quotes would save you real time. Then you move up, because it makes sense for you, and never because a plan with your name on it was quietly built to fall short.
That last thing is the line I care about most. Nobody using Wedding Desk should open the version meant for them and slowly realise it was designed to leave one thing out.
Wedding Desk Go will soon be ready for a free beta, and it stays free for as long as that beta runs. If you are serious about using it, send me a message to tell me you are interested. In return, I ask for regular updates on what works, what does not, what you would like to see and what you would take out.
