DIY invitations vs premade

I made mine. Ordered the linen paper off of Vista Print. They printed the template I uploaded. Anyway, I would have spent less money just buying invites than what I had to spend on corner punches, tape, paper cutter, lace, twine, cardstock, etc. Making my own, I probably spent around $250 for 75 invites. I could have ordered simple invites off of Vista Print for less than that. The ones I made are the only ones FH and I both agreed on, so that was that. I made them .I lost a lot of sanity in the process too.

I plan on printing my own on some nice card stock I purchased. Printing has been my hobby though so I can see that printing on envelopes, alignment, cutting, etc would be very annoying/wasteful if you are not relatively experienced. Make sure you limit the beading, ribbon, lace, etc so you can stay under 1oz!

I had mine done and it was so worth it.

I had a very low cost, DIY wedding, but I found it was sooooo much easier to order them. Like, not worth doing if you can find a design you can live with! We had then done through sealandsend.net, but we got all of our other things (STDs, thank you cards) off shutterfly, and almost went with that for our invites as well. The paper quality at both was impressive, and I was able to go with 100% recycled, and low impact inks in both. We were having a green wedding as much as possible, so that was important to me.

Seal and send had a specialist work with us to design our invite, sent samples, (physical dummies, and digital proofs of our final design.) They also worked with me during my moment of pre wedding crazy where I insisted the blue wasn't blue ENOUGH. (Yes, that came out of my mouth. Bride brain is a thing. For realz.)

The big reason I went with seal and sends was we saved a TON of money on postage. We were able to put normal postage on both the RSVP cards and the invite, so it cost us about $40 in postage. The normal invites with all the bits were ranging from 1.25 to 5.00 per envelope to mail it. Even assuming the low end, we saved $40.00. On the high end, we saved a few hundred. We also had a more informal wedding, so the seal and sends fit our vibe a little better than ivory card stock.

My invitations were just shy of $300 for 75, about $340 mailed.

Here is a lesson that my 14 months of wedding planning taught me:

You will either spend time or money.

That is all.

My invites are DIY.

I purchased a digital proof invite package from a designer on Etsy for $50. That included a save-the-date card, ceremony invitation, reception card, rsvp, thank you card, and two additional cards for directions and accommodations.

Standard card stock from Michael's. A pack of 100 sheets is $13 but I waited for a sale and used a coupon, ultimately paying $4 per pack.

I used white 5x7 envelopes for the STDs. A box of 100 at Michael's was $8, but again…sale with a 40% coupon. I think I paid $3.

I made a VERY detailed list of guests and figured out how many STDs and invites to send, keeping in mind that the invite goes to a household, not to each person. I also printed only what I needed for the out-of-town guests accommodations and directions cards.

I figured out how many of each card would fit on an 8.5 x 11 sheet and printed ONLY the exact number of sheets that I needed.

Staples charges .50 per sheet for color (single-sided). I signed up for their text coupons and used a $5 off $25.

I also purchased a paper cutter; it was $30, but I used another Staples coupon for that so it actually came out to $25.

I can confidently say my costs have been relatively low. I think the 5x7 STDs, for the paper and printing, came out to .42 cents each. That's of course not taking into account the design cost or the cutter. The other cards were even cheaper to produce, being smaller in size and more fit on a piece of paper.

I’m going with a belly-band packet, using lightweight envelopes for the inner & outer and rsvp envelopes.

Staples was the ONLY place that printed the cards in the correct color. I tried several printers (including my own at home, which used way too much ink), and there was no consistency. In my area, Kinkos/FedEx was twice as much as Staples and the color profile was awful.

Cutting & assembling is, honestly, very time-consuming, but I enjoy mindless tasks.

Vistaprint charges .64 cents for basic paper, and up to $1.00 for heavier stock. They do supply envelopes though, which is nice. I just felt VERY limited with their designs, so I did their "customized use your own image" option, but the samples were grainy and again, the wrong color.

This was very long. Sorry! Hope this helps though!

I did make invites for a work event recently, using pre made invites intended for a wedding.

I got them off of Staples.com, and it was $50 per hundred. Included the invite itself and envelope, the template was fairly easy to use.

I will say, it came out 1/8 of an inch off center, some smudged or inked unevenly (which bothered me, but I am type A), and did not include any of the other bits you may want.

If you just want a super simple invite, without any of the maps, dinner cards, RSVP cards, that was annoying, but do-able. Especially since I used a copier / printer, and set our trainee on pulling the cards ... it worked, and was cheaper. But - it also kinda looked it.

I DIY'd mine.

I downloaded some flourishes and designed the invite in MS word.

Ordered paper and rsvp envelopes from paper-papers.com

Had them printed at Office Max

Mine were also boxed invites, so I also ordered boxes, bought ribbon for the belly band and made paper flowers to place inside them and I added Swarovski crystals to the invite.

I prefer the look of professionally printed invites. You can always tell when someone has DIY'd them. I got mine on Vistaprint!

Also, change your avatar! The rings are associated with spam/trolls.

I needed about 100 invitations for 175 adults and ordered 120 suites. Mine were done locally - one of my best friends is a graphic designer so she designed them and we had them printed at a local print shop. Cost for 120 invitations for flat invites, RSVP postcards, printed envelopes, and reception insert was about $130. Having flat invites allowed us to use just one stamp per envelope, and then just one postcard stamp per RSVP card.

Second option would have been Vistaprint or Exclusively Weddings. I hate printing stuff like that and the cost of buying those kits didn't seem to be that much of a difference anyway.

We used a combo of DIY and professional. NotFroofy designed our invitations. We had Cards & Pockets do the printing and cutting, and also bought supplies (pockets, matting, etc.) from them. We then assembled them, glued the pieces together, and added magnetic closures and belly bands. Total cost for all our stationery and postage (which also included thank-you notes and photo sharing cards) was a little under $300. That included about 10 ceremony/luncheon invitations (pocketfolds with enclosures for accommodations, menu, and RSVP instructions) and about 50 at-home reception invitations (just flat cards with a couple of layers of matting. We didn't have reply cards, as all RSVPs were online.

I'm sure we could have found less expensive premade invitations from somewhere like Vistaprint or Michael's (each of which constantly has deals going on). However, we were doing so few, we figured the extra cost per invitation still wasn't going to end up being a major budget item. And we were able to have invitations, programs, thank you cards, and photo sharing cards that were based on the artwork of our ketubah (formal Jewish marriage contract), with the permission of the ketubah artist, which kind of tied things together.

I literally just posted this on another thread, but it applies here as well. Long story short, designing and printing my own, got paper and mattes from Hobby Lobby today (50% off papercrafting supplies right now) and am purchasing pockets and envelopes from Cards & Pockets.

Here's more detailed info that I posted in the other invitation thread...

I'm just looking into all of this recently because I was thinking I'd get mine printed from Vista Print during their Black Friday sale, but because I must be a masochist, I decided that I'm actually just going to DIY it all. I want pocketed, matted invites. Cards & Pockets have the best prices for that, but they're still not cheap. I'm buying the pockets and envelopes there which is already $90 after shipping. So I just purchased my invitation and insert paper as well as the matte from Hobby Lobby who's having a 50% sale on cardstock/papercrafting which ended up being about $10. I'm a graphic designer so I'm designing them myself (there are plenty of free templates online too if you're not a designer so don't fret) and I'm going to sneakily print everything at work--sssssh

For 50 invites it will cost about $100 plus the cost of a paper trimmer (maybe about $17 on Amazon). And I still have to design it all, trim it all, glue it all. Masochist. This is still significantly cheaper than if purchased it all with Cards & Pockets. Oh yeah I still have to buy glue too! It will be an undertaking, but I think I can handle it?

We needed to print invites, enclosures, envelopes, menus, place cards, thank you, Save the Dates, and programs. I actually went ahead and made my design, and was planning on going through Cat Print, and it would've cost $600 for everything (we we're doing magnet Save the Dates and shimmer paper for some things. cost for 80 invite sets and 120 of everything else)

There was a big coupon the other day for Wedding Paper Divas, and I scored $1500 of credit for $700. So we are getting letterpress invites and enclosures with envelope liners on their premium William Arthur paper, magnet save the dates, and regular menus, programs, and place cards etc. for $700. I think they will turn out much nicer than they would have because of the paper quality and design quality, so it was worth it to spend the extra $100

Moral of story: You can save money by doing DIY or semi-DIY, but you have to manage expectations about quality. Also, it might not cost much more to get them done for you depending on the deals you can get.

I designed mine, years ago before the internet...... and as everyone has said, there are tradeoffs to everything. We spent more money on the champagne necessary to bribe my MOH to watercolor them with me than we would have spent on just buying the darn things.

Cupcake theory,

Oh I forgot to add the cost of vector images I'm using to design my invites. Found those on Creative Market. The whole suite is $20 but I have a 20% off coupon and hoping it's even better Black Friday. Edited for spelling

Be aware that if you buy fancy tools/ dont have experince making paper products then it can cost similar to buying them on vista print. If you do have experince and you want them to be super fancy then it can save you tons.

I made my high school graduation invites and I regreted it severly. Making 200 invites by hand was a mess and I did not have a good printer, paper cutter, or hand writing. I'm very crafty so i thought it would be a piece of cake.....

150 invites on vista print is 105.

I am going the entire diy route. To me invites are not important, they end up in the trash. I originally found cards on amazon and envelopes. Decided I did not like how flimsy the card was (lol they are now going to be our thank you cards and what ever cards we need later on) for my invites I got a great deal at michaels on 100 invites, I then bought heavy card stock there to make my postcard stds and rsvps. I created the design on ms word. Getting the design was about a day process but it was more just playing with color and lay out and it was not a solid all day. I posted pictures of mine on another thread about invites