A guest list, and replies without the phone calls
A guest list is not a table of names — it is a web of families, addresses, replies, meals and allergies that the seating plan and the caterer both read from. And nobody wants to ring eighty people to ask “are you coming?”.
By household, the way people are actually invited
Guests belong to households: one envelope, one link, one reply per family. The Novák family get a single link and answer for all four of them — exactly how a paper invitation works.
Replies that arrive by themselves
Each household has its own link to the reply form: coming or not, meal choice, allergies, a song request if you want one. The counts look after themselves — how many confirmed, how many outstanding, who needs gluten-free.
Import from a spreadsheet
Already have the list in a spreadsheet? Upload it and the guests are created with their households, with duplicate checking and a preview first, so nobody is entered twice.
His side, her side, shared
Every guest shows which side they are there for. It is not a formality: the seating uses it, so one family does not end up scattered across the room. Who added a guest is remembered too — useful a month later when you are asking whose idea that was.
Children are counted differently from adults
Each guest has an age group, because a child is not half an adult — a different portion, a different price in the budget. Catering and the budget work that out themselves. It does not affect the seat, though: everyone who comes sits down, and a toddler in a high chair takes up a place exactly like an adult.
A plus-one without the confusion
A guest can have a plus-one, but a plus-one cannot have one of their own — the chain ends. It sounds like a detail until “+1 of a +1” appears on your list, someone nobody knows and nobody invited. A plus-one does not even need a name: until you ask, it is simply “Petr + 1” — and it still counts, because it needs a seat and a meal whether or not you know who is coming.
Search that does not need the accents
Type “nov” and you find Novák and Nováková; “sva” finds the Svobodas. You do not have to type diacritics and capitals do not matter — it matches the start of any word in the name. At eighty guests that is the difference between finding somebody and scrolling.
Export and import that survive a spreadsheet
You can download the list as CSV and upload it back: the export writes exactly the columns the import reads, so going out, fixing names in a spreadsheet and coming back loses nothing. The file is UTF-8 with a BOM — the dull detail that stops Excel on Windows showing “Nováková” as “Nováková”. For names with accents that is not a nicety, it is the difference between usable and not.
Common questions
- Do I need an email address for every guest?
- No. One per household is enough — it is the address the invitation link goes to. You can keep guests with no address at all; you just send the invitation another way and record the reply yourself.
- How do guests reply?
- They tap the link in the invitation and answer for the whole household — on a phone, without creating an account, in half a minute. The reply feeds straight into the counts, the catering and the budget.
- What if somebody replies and then changes their mind?
- They answer again on the same link. The latest reply stands and the earlier ones are kept, so what changed and when is traceable — not just the current state.
- How many guests does the free version handle?
- Up to forty, with no time limit. Above that you need the full version for a one-off 490 CZK. The limit only stops you creating more guests — editing, deleting and receiving replies always work, so you cannot be locked out of your own data.
- What if a few rows in my spreadsheet are wrong?
- The rest still imports. From a hundred and twenty rows with four bad ones you get a hundred and sixteen guests, and the four are listed back to you with a reason — the whole file is not thrown away for them. Matches with existing guests are offered for merging rather than merged automatically, and a merge only fills empty fields: nothing already there is overwritten.
- What happens when I delete a guest?
- They disappear from the list but do not cease to exist — their reply, their seat and their catering record all point at them and would stop making sense without them. That is why they can be restored, and why what happened when stays traceable.