Friday, September 25, 2009

AnRSVP.com - a Really Nice Site for Weddings

In my past few blogs you might have noticed a little bit negative tone. I know, it's just me. I like complaining. This time however, I am going to write about a website that is actually quite cool. I was looking for a free online wedding RSVP service and I could not find a good one that would be free. And then bang - AnRSVP.com - this is what I was looking for. Not any $20 registration fee, not any $15 a month fee or other nonsense charges... it's absolutely free.

This is not a random event RSVP service - it is specifically designed for weddings. For example, two people can log in to the same account: the bride and the groom using their own names. The RSVP page itself shows a RSVP card with a bride and a groom "engraved" in it. Also, there is a field for a "Menu choice" and "Guest notes" so that people can tell what they are going to eat and request a song for example. That is pretty cool and not all RSVP services have these things.

Some of the other RSVP services want you to create an account in order for you to be able to RSVP, but not here. Guests just enter their names and there it is. Or they can have their own private response URL address so they don't even have to enter their names at all... just the response itself. Also, it is possible to lock the guest list so that random people can't add themselves to the list and only the existing people from the guest list can respond, which I found very useful. They have few more options, like uploading pictures or changing the colors, which is cool too.

I think I have exhausted my level of positiveness already. Gah, I was never so positive before but this website made my day. Time for some negativity finally! Sometimes I was a little bit annoyed how slow my guest list was loading. I don't know if it's just my internet connection or theirs but the problem is not the waiting time for anything to show up on the screen - it's how slow the screen was loading with text, line by line.

The ads are fine with me - that's how they make money I guess - but I would appreciate an option for disabling the ads... maybe for a small fee, like $5.00. I would be fine with that and with a thought that my guests will see nice and clean response page without any "Sponsored links" or "Google Ads". Also, they have a community site http://anrsvp.ecrowds.com but it seems like nobody visits it... the latest post I found was from a month ago. I guess not too many people are using that service and I don't know why... it's so good.

Even though they are not perfect, I am quite happy they provide service like that and I believe it is the best free wedding RSVP service on the net. I sincerely spent quite a while searching. If you are getting married, you should certainly consider using them.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks Phil for the nice comments. We have actually implemented your idea recently. Now for $5.00 one time fee you can get rid af all the ads. Thanks for a great idea.

    You mentioned that not too many people are using our service. Well, currently we have 932 active accounts. And by active, I mean accounts that have not been disabled and whose owners logged in within last year. Multiply that number by 2 (bride and groom) and it gives you 1864 users. So our community is certainly growing.

    With the community site, users apparently prefer sending us emails directly as we get a lot of these. We might disable the community site altogether somewhere in near future.

    You mentioned that you had to wait long for things to show on your screen. Recently we have improved performance of our database and things work much faster now. Hopefully you won't experience any slowness anymore.

    Thanks

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  2. i have been using anrsvp for my upcoming wedding, and I think it's really great so far. I started it up back in august, and i also did a lot of searching for something free and simple. this definitely works. No problems so far, would recommend the site highly. It's also nice to see (from their response to your blog) that they are interested in improving with user feedback. I have no complaints!

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  3. Hello, it is us again. Just wanted to mention an update to our previous post from February 2010 you can see above: we already reached 2,500 active accounts. We also implemented plenty of features and improvements suggested by our users.

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  4. Glad I found this thread. I'm using AnRSVP for my wedding this May and I already can't say enough great things! It is very user friendly, super easy to navigate, and the most customizable site I've found. AnRSVP even let's us customize the "attending" and "not attending" phrases so that they matched our theme! I also like how they do open RSVPs so that we don't have to input everyone's name. Our guests will know if they need to put a plus one based on their paper invitation. We can also set how many people can respond per household while using the open RSVP feature. Even the confirmation page of the RSVP can be customized, which I haven't found anywhere else! We made ours link to our registry and our hotel blocks. Also, the customer service is fantastic! I had a couple questions and received a response each time in less than 24 hours. More people need to know about AnRSVP and should give it a try!

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