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2026 wedding season · Buyer's guide, not a ranking

How to choose an RSVP service for an Indian wedding

Five ways a 300-guest guest list actually gets run, what each one really costs, and the six questions worth asking before you sign anything. We sell one of the five. That is disclosed on this page rather than buried in a footer.

We are one of the options on this page

AI Shaadi runs wedding guest lists on WhatsApp. That is the fifth option below, and it is ours. So this page does not rank anything — every other category in this directory is sorted by public Google review data, and ordering our own competitors would be an advertisement with numbers on it, however honestly we calculated them.

What you get instead is the five real approaches with the case against each one, including ours, and the questions that would expose us if we were bluffing.

The five ways this actually gets done

In no order. Four of these are the right answer for somebody, and the first one is free.

  • The family does it themselves

    Right when
    Under about 150 guests, everyone local, no rooms to book
    Roughly costs
    Free, and roughly 40–60 hours of somebody’s life
    What works
    Nobody knows the guest list like the family does. A cousin calling a cousin gets an answer that a stranger never will.
    Where it breaks
    It collapses somewhere past 200 guests, and it collapses on the person least able to say no — usually one sibling or one aunt.

  • A guest-desk hired by the planner

    Right when
    250+ guests, most weddings in this bracket
    Roughly costs
    ₹800–1,200 per person per day, typically 10–15 people
    What works
    It is how the industry already works, the planner already invoices it, and a human on a phone handles the eighty-year-old who will not use WhatsApp.
    Where it breaks
    Counts live in one person’s notebook. When they change at 11pm the caterer finds out at 9am, and nobody can reconstruct who said what.

  • A wedding-website RSVP form

    Right when
    Diaspora and NRI weddings, guests comfortable with forms
    Roughly costs
    ₹0–5,000 for the platform
    What works
    Clean data, no chasing, and it is free or nearly free.
    Where it breaks
    Indian response rates on a web form are poor and the non-responders are exactly the guests who matter. It answers "who replied", never "who is coming".

  • A WhatsApp broadcast from a personal number

    Right when
    Anyone improvising
    Roughly costs
    Free
    What works
    Everybody is already on WhatsApp and it costs nothing to start.
    Where it breaks
    An unofficial number sending 300 messages gets rate-limited or banned mid-event, and the replies arrive as 300 separate chats nobody can total up.

  • A managed RSVP service on an official WhatsApp number

    This is us
    Right when
    300+ guests, travel and rooms involved
    Roughly costs
    A flat fee per wedding
    What works
    Replies are captured as structured data, the number is Meta-approved so it does not get banned, and rooming and arrival sheets fall out of it automatically.
    Where it breaks
    It is a new line item to justify unless the planner already bills a guest desk, and the category is young enough that few providers have a long track record.

Six questions to ask any provider

Us included. Especially us.

Is the WhatsApp number official?

Ask for the Meta Business verification, not a screenshot of a chat. An unofficial number — a personal handset with a scanner app — can be rate-limited or banned partway through a wedding, and there is no appeal that completes before the event does.

Who makes the first call, a person or a bot?

For an Indian wedding the first contact should be human. A family that receives an automated first message from an unknown number reads it as spam, and the relationship the host spent years building is the thing being spent.

Does a human check the final headcount?

Ask specifically. Language models misread "haan bhai aa jayenge, 4 log" more often than any vendor will volunteer. Somebody should sign off the number that reaches the caterer, and you should be told who.

What happens to the guest data afterwards?

Phone numbers, dietary notes and ID documents for 300 families are a real liability. Ask where it is stored, who can see it, how long it is kept, and get the deletion commitment in writing before the first message goes out.

Is the price a flat fee or a percentage?

A percentage of wedding spend gives the vendor an interest in the wedding costing more. A flat fee per wedding does not. This one line tells you a lot about how the rest of the relationship will go.

Can I see it running before I commit?

Any provider should be able to show a live thread on a real number. If the only thing on offer is a slide deck, the product may not exist yet — including, at time of writing, in the parts of this market that market themselves hardest.

When you should not hire us

  • Under 300 guests. Below that a family member with a notebook genuinely does this better than we do, and cheaper.
  • Everyone lives in the same city. No travel, no rooms, no airport pickups — most of what we do has nothing to attach to.
  • The wedding is in under two weeks. The first outreach call is human and it takes the time it takes.

Where we actually stand today

AI Shaadi is launching for the 2026 wedding season. No wedding has run for a paying customer yet, there are no case studies to show you, and this page would be the wrong place to imply otherwise. If that rules us out for your wedding, one of the other four options above is the right answer and we would rather you picked it than found out too late.