About this site

The problem we are trying to fix

Search for what a wedding costs and you get a national average — a single number blended across every market in the country. It is not much help when you are standing in a venue off the 281 trying to work out whether the quote in your hand is reasonable.

Local pricing exists, but it is scattered across vendor sites, buried in PDFs, quoted only on request, and it moves every season. Collecting it properly is unglamorous work. That is the work this site does.

Rules we follow before publishing a price

These are enforced in the software, not just in editorial policy — a figure that fails them cannot be published:

• Nothing unsourced. A benchmark goes live only with at least three independent data points, or after a named staff review or direct vendor confirmation.
• Quoted and paid are different numbers. We record which one each figure is. Conflating them is the most common error in wedding pricing.
• Every price carries its context. Category, area, year, month, guest-count band, package type and unit — a figure without these is not comparable to anything.
• Estimates are labelled as estimates. Where we have not yet gathered enough local data, anything shown is marked an editorial estimate at low confidence. It is never dressed up as researched.
• Stale data expires. Figures are re-checked on an 18-month cycle; wedding pricing moves too fast to trust a number indefinitely.

Guest privacy

Couples who use the calculator are recorded in guest-count bands, never exact counts, because an exact guest count plus a date and a venue can identify a specific wedding. Contact details submitted for a quote are kept only as long as they are needed to service that request.

How this is paid for

Vendors can pay for featured placement in the directory. That buys position and presentation — it does not buy a better cost benchmark, and it never changes what the calculator returns. Where the two could conflict, the pricing data wins; otherwise the numbers are worthless and so is the site.

Current status

This is an early preview. The taxonomy of categories and service areas is in place, the underlying data model is built, and the calculator and directory are being written now. There is no published pricing data or vendor listing yet.

If you are a local vendor, or you have real quotes or invoices from a recent San Antonio wedding, that is exactly what we need.