Smartly Wed reviews: AppyCouple wedding websites

Wedding websites make life easy for your guests, with the start times, hotel information, registry details, and other logistics all in one place. AppyCouple specializes in wedding websites (and an accompanying app, hence the name), and in this post, we’re covering all of their features: pricing, managing your guest list, what you can (and can’t) customize, and more.

Be sure to check out our review of Minted wedding websites (which has just been updated with current pricing) if you haven’t already seen it! We’ve included some relevant comparisons between the Minted sites and the AppyCouple sites in this post, as well.

The image in these screenshots is from Kim’s engagement shoot, taken by the amazing Martin Reardon.

This post includes affiliate links, marked with an asterisk (*) – if you click through and/or make a purchase using these links, it generates a small amount for us, at absolutely no cost to you. We’ll always include the full name of products so you can find them easily, should you prefer not to use our links. If you do use our links, a huge thank you for helping us continue to grow Smartly Wed!

• Features & pricing
• Design & customization
• Pages: Travel, registry, wedding party, and more
• Pages: Events & RSVPs
• Our take

AppyCouple wedding websites: Features & pricing

As mentioned in our Minted review post, I went with with AppyCouple * for my wedding website. I liked the integrated app for guests and, at the time – three years ago – the cost was $35 for the standard offering. The current (July 2018) cost for AppyCouple is $49 for the “boutique” tier and $149 for the “luxury” tier. The features included in each tier can be seen here, and it’s important to note that the only difference between the two is that the higher-priced tier gives you access to the “luxury” website designs from Carolina Herrera (you can preview those here), CeCi New York (here), and their Paradise collection (here).

The designs are my favorite AppyCouple feature and there are many more available now than when S and I signed up. That said, you can find almost all of those designs with the $49 tier. If you genuinely love one of the “luxury” designs and don’t mind spending the money, go for it, but I think $149 is a staggering price for a wedding website, particularly because that additional $100 only gets you additional designs. I’d think that the higher tier would come with a custom URL, a custom monogram option, or similar, at least.

What else comes with the price? You don’t get a custom domain (whereas Minted gives you one year free with their $20 plan), but you do have the option to choose your privacy setting with both plans, and, as mentioned, there is an app for guests.

How important is a custom domain? I think they’re convenient, but not necessary. Your guests may be able to remember “nameandname.com” than your default URL through AppyCouple – [nameyouchoose].appycouple.com – but you’re probably still going to need to remind people of the website address. All AppyCouple customers get the ability to customize their address, but if there’s already a couple with your name, you’ll have to come up with an alternative (e.g. adding the year to the end).

Privacy options

Speaking of privacy, there are currently four options available on AppyCouple: 1) anyone can find your site, 2) you can require your code (the numerical code generated by AppyCouple) for someone to view your website, 3) you can let anyone see your site but require a match to your (uploaded) database for people to RSVP, and 4) you can require both a code and a database match (see more on privacy here). If you use the companion app, all guests will need your wedding code to see your page, even if you go without a privacy setting on the browser site.

S and I originally went with option #2, requiring a code, and put the code on our save-the-dates. After being asked to remind people of the code, we went with option #1, where anyone with the URL could see our site. Our registries were set to private, wherever possible, so anyone without the link would be unable to find them.

When I signed up for our site, AppyCouple offered the option to customize your event code from the 5-digit number to anything you wanted for $15. Instead of my code being 12345, or what have you, I could’ve set it to “smartlywed” (so long as someone hadn’t already used it). I wasn’t able to find anything suggesting this is still an option, but it may be.

If you’re concerned about privacy – keeping in mind that registries have their own settings – it could be worth it to require guests to have a code to access your website through AppyCouple (just be aware that guests are unlikely to remember your numerical code!)

AppyCouple has a privacy / access feature Minted doesn’t have: the ability to add additional “admins,” be they a fiance, parent, wedding planner, or whomever. You can add up to four additional people, though there doesn’t seem to be an option to limit that person’s ability to edit the site.

The AppyCouple app

One of the main appeals of AppyCouple * for me was that guests could download the app and have easy access to our site. I assumed many of our guests would be attending other weddings where the couple also had an AppyCouple site, and so they’d use one app over and over and not have to worry about remembering website addresses or codes. They could easily upload photos to share, and everyone would have a great time.

I didn’t poll our guests, but it didn’t seem that anyone used the app, and I couldn’t say how many of our guests attended other weddings where they might’ve used the app. No one uploaded photos or “toasts” through the app, at any rate, but we also didn’t explicitly encourage them to do so.

Design & customization

Once you’ve signed up and signed in, you’ll see a dashboard like the one below. This is a more user-friendly site than it was when I first signed up, and I think it’s straightforward to find the parts you’d want to edit.

There are hundreds of designs included with AppyCouple’s * “boutique” tier, and many more than there were in 2015 when I originally signed up. Many designs have multiple color options: For example, the image below shows our design, the “striped modern” (white with gold and silver stripes) as currently also available in white with pink and gray stripes, white with purple and gray stripes, and black with gold and silver stripes. 

 

As with Minted, you have the option to have all sections on one page (and have the header menu skip down to that section) or multiple pages. A newer feature is the ability to change the font on your site; we were limited to the font that came with that template. I counted 17 total fonts that came up as options for our design, with a range of formal and informal options. I like the default all-caps sans-serif font that our design had, but it’s nice to have options.

AppyCouple has started offering monograms in a variety of styles for you to add to your site or incorporate in other items for your wedding (programs, etc.) The option I selected, in writing this post, cost $45 for digital files and $95 for a print-ready option, as well. It looks like they’re just adding custom initials to preset designs and possibly changing the colors, so I’d probably try to first create one by myself (in Adobe Illustrator or Canva, for example).

Pages: Travel, registry, wedding party, and more

There are 14 options for pages you can turn on or off: a full-screen cover page and a welcome page, plus hotels, events, RSVPs, travel, key people, gallery, gifts, photos, guestbook, countdown, toasts, and our app. You can reorder these pages. Some pages (“countdown” and “toasts”) are app-only.

S and I used a welcome page but not a cover page (below), as well as events, RSVP (which turns on automatically if you allow any RSVPs for any events), travel (where we put hotel info, rather than having them on separate pages), gifts, photos, countdown, and our app.

The “photos” section is designed for you to upload photos of you as a couple and add captions, progressing from the start of your relationship through the present. The “gallery” section is just for photos without captions and your guests can add to it through the app if you set permissions that way. If you’d like guests to share photos from your wedding, rehearsal dinner, or other wedding event with you and with other guests, this is a nice way to do so. It requires them to download the app, of course, which may limit how widely the photos are shared.

I liked the “travel” section and its handy drag-and-drop widgets quite a lot. The sections that say “directions” and “room blocks” and so on are all built into the system; you just select the ones you want and customize the text. In retrospect, the ability to easily add specific sections was my favorite thing about AppyCouple *

I wish the registry section were labeled “registry,” and not “gifts,” but your guests will know what they’ll find there. If you’re registered at reasonably common locations, those options will be available in AppyCouple to select; all you need to do is list the names under which you’re registered. If you have a less-common registry location, you can add the link to your registry directly.

The “notes” widget on the registry page was another appealing customizable feature (something Minted didn’t have). I used it to give our guests information about sales, free shipping, and the like.

If you’d like to feature your bridal party, parents, or other VIPs on your AppyCouple site, the “key people” page allows you to customize the name of groups and add a bit of information about those people.

I appreciated the “our app” page, which explained how to find the AppyCouple app and provided the code needed to access it. If privacy is a concern, however, please note that there isn’t an option (as far as I can tell) to have the “our app” page without the code displayed.

The Minted paid plan allows you to add your own page beyond what’s included in their free plan; there’s no such option with AppyCouple, but I’m unable to think of anything obvious that couldn’t be covered by the existing options.

Events & RSVPs

You can add as many events as you have associated with the wedding – not only the ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception, but any pre- or post-wedding events, as well. As shown in the photo below, you have the option to add the address and specific notes to your guests using the drag-and-drop widgets (the “dress code” and “notes” sections were widgets I added). Guests can click through the list of events on the left to see the details for each.

It’s easy to edit the details of your event and toggle on or off whether you want events to be public or private, and whether you want to allow RSVPs.

We set our “events” to have some public and some private (e.g. so only our parents and siblings would see the rehearsal dinner), but doing so automatically triggered an RSVP page, which I didn’t realize until I saw that people were RSVPing on the site.

AppyCouple has a CSV template you can follow to upload your guest list, which you’ll want to do if you plan to set some events as private, such as a bachelorette weekend, rehearsal dinner, and so on. As with Minted, you can specify which guests should see which events and whether that guest should receive a plus one (there’s also an option on the dashboard to give everyone a set number of plus ones).

Unlike with Minted, you can’t set a specific guest count per guest: If you want to have a couple with two kids listed, you would say that’s a party of four. You’d need to list them together on AppyCouple and give three plus ones (allowing for four total guests), list the adults separately and add the two kids as plus ones, or list all four separately. You do have the option with AppyCouple to group guests, which means any member of the group could RSVP for the whole group; this is particularly handy when children are invited.

Unless you change your privacy settings to limit who can RSVP, anyone with the site code could enter their information to RSVP for your non-private events, and they’ll see a screen like this:

If someone doesn’t have a site code, the previous screen has an option to contact the host (you) to ask for the code. I imagine this would be used by guests who actually forgot the code, but there is a chance that other people, provided they had the link to your site, could contact you, as well. We didn’t use AppyCouple for our RSVPs, so we didn’t have anyone request the code this way.

As explained in our Minted review, guests enter their names and are prompted to confirm them; without restricting your privacy settings (to options #3 or #4, above), that won’t happen with AppyCouple. That said, one of my complaints with the Minted RSVP feature was that guests could, depending on what they entered, see any number of other guests’ names. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to see other guests’ names with AppyCouple.

Our take

AppyCouple will give you an elegant wedding website, but that comes at a cost. If you’re deciding between the paid Minted plan or the lower-tier AppyCouple plan, there’s still a $29 difference in price, but AppyCouple’s designs might tip in their favor. I can’t encourage anyone to sign up for the $149 plan – personally, I don’t think those designs are worth the extra money – but it is available, should you decide to go that direction. It’d be great to see AppyCouple add more features for the $149 “luxury” plan, in the future.

Thinking about AppyCouple * vs. Minted * wedding websites, I think AppyCouple sites tend to have a cleaner look, and if your guests will use the app, that’s a point in their favor. I don’t blame a wedding guest for not wanting to download a new app just to access one couple’s wedding website. If lots of couples start encouraging their guests to use the AppyCouple app, and the guests could access everything all in one place, using it would make more sense. If guests won’t use the app, the price difference may just be a question of aesthetics and which designs you like best.

Would I use AppyCouple again, given the current prices and current competition, such as from Minted, and knowing that our guests wouldn’t use the app? I probably would, because I like the ability to add custom widgets to each page and I like the overall look, even though the price is higher for AppyCouple, but it’s not as obvious a decision for me as the one I made originally.

 

What matters most to you in setting up a wedding website? Are you planning to sign up – or have you already signed up – to make your wedding website with AppyCouple? Leave a comment and let us know!