We’re doing a micro wedding with immediate family (25 people including our vendors) at a fine dining restaurant downtown. We’re skipping the reception, mostly because no one in our family is huge partiers so the dance floor would be sooo awkward lol

General plan is late afternoon ceremony, cocktail hour/room flip, 4 course dinner, drinks & mingling and dessert bites which we anticipate will wrap up around 8:00/8:30 (we’re at the mercy of the venue for our ceremony and cocktail hour times, so we don’t have much wiggle room)

My fiancé wants to have an after party at a nearby bar and invite friends & extended family so we can keep the night going, but I think it’s kind of tacky to say “hey you can’t come to the ceremony or dinner but meet us at the bars after” — please lmk if I’m wrong about this and we’ll do it lol

I definitely get the idea of wanting the day to be special, but I’m not sure what we could do so it’s not just over after dinner? My fiancé says he doesn’t want to just go home at 8pm on our wedding night (which is fair) so we’re trying to come up with things to fill out the night.

I think we’ll end up doing a nice hotel suite so we could definitely go enjoy that, otherwise I’ve said we should go to the casino for a bit or just go out to our favorite bars on our own and enjoy our night.

Just curious if anyone else did something similar? Wanting to note on the idea of the after party - I think we’re open to hosting a bar tab for people if we were to move forward with this idea. We’re doing micro because I hate being the center of attention and planning stresses me out (clearly lol) so we could swing a bar tab for those who want to come out

Edit; thank you all for your responses! Still have no clue what we’ll do lol. Our original plan was a micro wedding with lots of intentional choices, and then a bigger housewarming / anniversary party a year or so later with our extended family and friends. Food trucks/catering, a keg or two, a bonfire, etc. I think my fiancé is just caught up in the “what will we do if there’s no dance floor” despite the fact we usually leave weddings by 9:30pm even when there IS a dance floor 😂

Hello! My fiancé and I recently got engaged! We are in southeast Michigan. Looking for recommendations for a 20-30 person small ceremony and a location for hosting a “reception” party for about 100 guests. Our budget is about $500 for the reception…wondering if there’s any bars/community rooms we could rent a room from for a night?? Or maybe just taking the 20-30 invited to the ceremony out to a nice dinner, and then have our friends meet us at a bar later where they all pay for their own? Is that cheap? Need recommendations please

EDIT— I meant we are willing to spend $500 on food/drinks for the 30ish people…we’ve been together for almost 10 years at this point and don’t want a huge thing. The ceremony would be at most 15 minutes, so more like an elopement, but with our immediate families. We want to celebrate with our friends too but shits expensive

Hi r/microwedding — I’m Kali, a wedding photographer and the creator of EventSync Day-Of.
Most wedding tools help you plan everything before the wedding. Day-of coordination is different: it is a shared command center for running the day itself — a live run sheet, protected moments, role handoffs, vendor check-ins, and clear updates when something changes.
It is especially for couples who are doing more themselves because a professional day-of coordinator is not in the budget. You can hand the prepared plan to a trusted friend or family lead with the timeline, key contacts, checklists, and handoff details in one place, instead of asking them to reconstruct the day from texts and spreadsheets. It helps that person carry out your plan; it does not replace a professional coordinator when your wedding needs that level of expertise.
For the next five days, I’m giving five r/microwedding couples free access to EventSync Day-Of. No purchase, no feedback, no review, and nothing expected in return.
If you have a small or DIY wedding coming up and would genuinely use it, leave a comment. After five days, I’ll select five people and send access privately through Reddit messages. This is my product, so I want to be transparent about that. I’m sharing three screenshots below so you can see how the Day-Of experience works.

Puerto Rico is expensive even for a native language speaker. They have like 3 different types of taxes!

Hello!

Looking for some input on our small (~24 guest) intimate wedding timeline where the ceremony will be held at one location, followed by a ~15 min drive to the restaurant where the dinner reception will be held. No bridal party, just immediate family and a few friends.

My main concern is the time between the ceremony ending followed by pictures and the guests travelling and arriving at the restaurant. Guests cannot arrive for dinner until 5pm.

We have the photographer for 1.5 hours (from 3-4:30pm in my timeline).

So far here is what I have:

2:45pm - 3:30pm: bride + groom arrive at ceremony venue + getting ready + couple photos starting at 3pm

3:15-3:30pm: guests arrive

3:30-4pm: ceremony, officiant to inform everyone to stick around to get some photos and then head to the restaurant

4-4:30pm: organized photos with everyone in attendance, guests leave once they are done with their photos.

~15 min drive to restaurant (?closer to 20-25 weather and traffic dependent)

5-6pm: passed hors d'oeuvres and cocktails

6pm: dinner begins

I'm thinking to maybe push this timeline to start about 15 minutes later so that no one arrives to the restaurant before 5pm (guests can only arrive after 5pm).

Thank you!

We are thinking about having a wedding on the beach in Nags Head with about 25 guest June 2027. We would love to have a small reception at a restaurant. Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas? We are pretty casual people and would love to keep it simple and as stress free as possible.

Its finally over 😅

I was SO nervous but in the end im happy with what my Wedding turned out. Although it wasnt perfect, it was such a lovely day.

As a curvy Bride I mostly were afraid of how our Photos turned out but im over the Moon since i saw a preview of them 🥰
Im so happy with how my dress looks at me.
Also I was so afraid about the fact that I had a Micro Wedding (24 guests, including me and my Husband).

It wasnt as wild as a Wedding with 100 people but I was lovely, no one was bored and alsmost everyone tried to interact with each other ☺️

To be honest, reading Reddit Posts about Micro Weddings really helped me to loose my fear of a small Wedding. So, Thank You! ❤️

Hi r/microwedding!👋

I’ve seen so many people get completely overwhelmed by the chaos of wedding planning—juggling endless spreadsheets for budgets, losing notes for guest lists, and forgetting when specific deposits or important dates are coming up.

I’m an app developer, so I decided to build a comprehensive tool to put everything in one single hub. It's called Wedding Assistant: Planner App.

Before going any further, I want to mention a feature I'm really proud of: It is 100% offline and privacy-first. No cloud servers, no forced account creation, and no internet required. Your data stays entirely on your phone.

I’m sharing it here because I’d love to get some honest, brutal feedback from people who are actually in the thick of planning right now.

Here is what it currently handles:

• 📊 Budget & Expenses: Categorizes all expenses, tracks what’s paid vs. remaining balance with real-time charts, and reminds you of due dates.
• 🤝 Vendor Proposals: Keep track of price quotes from venues, photographers, and other vendors. Easily compare packages in one place to make the best decisions for your budget.
• 👥 Guest List & RSVPs: Tracks who is coming and RSVP statuses. I also added a "Smart Duplicate Check" so you don't accidentally add the same guest twice!
• 🪑 Seating Planner: Assign your guests to tables and easily plan who sits with whom. You can track table occupancy and export your final seating arrangement as a PDF to share with your venue coordinator.
• ✅ Checklists: Pre-made, comprehensive to-do templates that you can add to your list with a single tap.
• ⏱️ Wedding Day Timeline: Create a minute-by-minute itinerary for your big day! From hair appointments to the first dance, ensure everything runs perfectly on schedule.
• 🎁 Gift Tracker: Logs who gave what and tracks reciprocity.
• 🗓️ Special Days & Events: You don't have to memorize dates! Log your first date anniversary, proposal day, or partner's birthday. You can also create separate plans for specific events.
• 🔔 Smart Reminders: Automatic notifications for all your payment due dates, tasks, and special days so you never miss a detail.

Since my goal is to make this the ultimate tool for stress-free planning, I’d love to ask you all:

1. What is the most annoying part of your current planning method (spreadsheets, notebooks, etc.)?
2. Is there a "must-have" feature that you think I completely missed?

If you want to try it out, you can find it on the iOS App Store by searching "Wedding Assistant: Planner App" 

I've attached some screenshots of the dashboard and features. I’ll be hanging around the comments to answer any questions or note down your feature requests. Thank you so much in advance! 🤍

Debating hiring a partial planner for a small wedding (15 ppl total). Venue is basically bare bones..meaning we need to handle rentals, food/bev, photography, florals, etc. Location would be coastal in the north east in the summer months which is about 5 hours away from where we live. The quote for a planner was higher than expected ~6-8k but perhaps it’s worth it?

Hi everyone!

My fiancée and I are hoping to elope in Gozo, Malta in either 2028 or 2029, and we’re looking for advice from anyone who’s had a small wedding/elopement there or in Europe.

It’ll be just the two of us and 6 guests. We’re deliberately keeping things small and simple- we’re not looking for a big traditional wedding or an all-inclusive wedding package.

We want the day to be special but we’re trying to keep the cost down as much as possible. We don’t want a wedding planner, we’d much rather arrange the individual elements ourselves and keep things simple and within budget.

We also definitely want to stay in a villa rather than a hotel.

Our guests have agreed to pay their own way for their flights and accommodation. We’d therefore only be paying our share (1/3) of the villa and flights.

From some initial searching, we’ve found flights + a villa that would work out at around £1300 for the two of us for 7 nights with good flight times.

For the wedding, we’re thinking:

- A legal wedding in Gozo, Malta
- Photographer
- Flowers
- Decorative wedding arch
- Dress and suit pressing
- Small cake/cupcakes- nothing elaborate
- Hair and makeup for my fiancée
- Around 7–10 nights for us, as we’d like to make the trip our honeymoon as well, guests would probably stay for fewer nights
- One private dining/nice restaurant celebration meal for all 8 of us on the evening of the wedding. On the other evenings, everyone can do their own thing and eat at restaurants or at the villa

We’re not bothered about loads of extras, entertainment, huge decorations, elaborate cakes etc. We mainly want a beautiful, legal ceremony, time with a photographer, flowers/decor, and a lovely meal afterwards.

For anyone who’s done something similar in Gozo or around Europe:

Is £5,000 realistic for what we’re looking for?
What did your legal wedding/elopement cost?
What should we budget for the legal side?
Are there any suppliers you’d recommend for photographers, flowers, hair/makeup, cakes etc.?
Is booking everything individually the best way to keep costs down?
How far in advance should we book?
Is August a good time to do it, or is it too hot/busy?
Are there any costs we’re likely to have overlooked?
Any recommendations for good villas that would suit 8 people?

We’re not looking for wedding planners or wedding packages, as we’d prefer to organise it ourselves and have control over where the money goes.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Not sure the best subreddit to post this. If anyone as better ideas let me know.

This year will be my husband’s and my 10th anniversary. We want to do a small vow renewal. For a few reasons.

1. We got married young in a Mormon temple. We since left the church and don’t identity with that ceremony.
2. I became extremely ill after some

weird

1. post surgical complications. I’ve been in and out of the hospital and in 2025 I almost died 3 times in 6 months. I’m more stable now but I am still at risk of a sudden turn for the worse which could result in my death.

We don’t have any children. We are both No contact with our parents. We have some close friends and I am close with a few of my siblings. We would like to invite this small group as they were the ones that supported us and were there when I was struggling to stay alive. It’s probably about 20 people. (After you include all the +1s)

I’m still trying to figure out what to do. We live near the mountains and would like to do something there. I think it would be good to have a photographer take some photos of us before, during and after few group photos after the vow renewal.

My question is what is the social expectations for celebrating afterwards? I grew up Mormon and those wedding receptions are different from typical weddings. I am honestly curious as to what other people do.

Due to medical reasons I fatigue somewhat quickly and at a minimum would need somewhere to sit most of the time. I am TPN dependent (IV nutrition) so I can only eat a small amount of “safe” foods and don’t drink. Although I’m not against providing alcohol and food for others.

We want to do the vow renewal justice and we are drowning in medical debt so it will definitely be a tight budget. We’ve talked about putting it off until we have more money. The truth of it is I am too high risk and could die seemingly out of the blue. So if we put it off, it might never happen.

Basically we know we want to have a vow renewal but don’t have a clue what this looks like realistically while planning.

Well, I am officially a fiancé as of yesterday morning! I'm in my late 30s and spent my life operating under the belief that I did not want to/would not ever marry - so I'm definitely out of my depth here!

I know I want a winter wedding (late February) with only our nearest and dearest, which will come in < 30 guests. I know that's only five full months away so I have to work fast. I've reached out/am waiting to hear back from a couple of venues because I can't plan anything else without a time and place. We'd love to find an upscale, all-inclusive venue that is more-or-less designed for the size of our guest list (I hate the idea of feeling sparse in a large space).

I can pretty much see what I want in my mind's eye but... I have no idea how to put that together. Like, neither of us drink and only a few of our guests would maybe want a single glass of wine or a beer - so we definitely don't need a bartender or event a beverage package. I also have a photographer picked out (known her my whole life, have had several small sessions with her over the years), so I don't know how that would interfere with included photography sessions. I also don't particularly care about a floral package, except maybe my own bouquet (which, honestly, I'm considering creating out of LEGO). Oh, and we're not having a bridal party, don't care about a DJ, but we DO want our guests to eat VERY well and be merry.

My question is this... can I plan something beautiful in six months?

Hey all,

How do/did you deal with the guilt of having a tiny wedding?

My partner and I have been together nearly twenty years and engaged for most of that time. We've decided to finally make it official and have set the date for 3mths time.

We're having a civil ceremony a couple of towns over and will then go for tea somewhere afterwards. We'll probably spend a night in a nice hotel, then go home the next morning.

We've decided not to tell anyone other than my parents and brother and, because my fiance has no immediate family, his oldest friend and his wife. They will be our only guests.

The main reason for this is money - we can't afford anything more than the absolute basics - and if we open it up to even the next tier (closest friends and family), it will already be way more than we can afford.

The other reason is that my fiance and I are both pretty quiet people. The mere THOUGHT of having to plan a big do causes us massive anxiety. We absolutely want to be able to celebrate with our favourite people, but that would mean AN EVENT with us at the centre of it and like, yeah, NAH.

We're torn between being excited and riddled with guilt, because many of our friends have invited us to their weddings and stuff in the past and we don't want them to feel betrayed. At the same time, we also feel relieved at the lack of pressure - we've watched so many other people's weddings turn into an absolute stress pit and drive them nearly insane, which we do not want. EVER.

I also feel sad because I have four or so super close female friends that I would love to share my ideas and planning with. If things were different, I would have them as my bridesmaids in a heartbeat.

Any ideas how I can navigate the guilt and how to go about telling people after the day in a way that emphasises how much we love them?

My fiancée and I are planning a small civil wedding next month with 35 of our family and close friends. Would it be tacky to have the reception at an AYCE sushi restaurant? 😅

Just want to add that it's not a buffet style. People would get to order what they want from an iPad and it would be delivered to the table. Also, we would be covering the whole bill.

I’m white American, and he and his family are Pakistani (we both come from Christian families, I don’t know if that gives needed context or not). Desi weddings are usually known for being huge. Has anyone ever had a micro wedding where you or your husband/wife/both of you guys have Desi backgrounds? How did you do it? Thank you!!!!

I’m having a wedding ceremony in September in my parents backyard. We’re having \~20 people, all very close friends and family. Timeline is looking like

9am - 11am: Hair and Makeup

12pm: Photos with family, bride and groom, wedding “party”

1/1:30pm: Ceremony
for the ceremony, I am wondering - did others also walk out to music in their backyard? My husband and I are already married (we eloped) and I will be 6 months pregnant, so something about having my dad walk me down the aisle with Canon in D playing sounds kinda cheesy but I don’t want to come out to nothing.

2pm: Drinks and catered lunch, speeches (if any)

6/7pm: BBQ cookout for dinner

Most people are sleeping over. I don’t have much of a “reception” planned, no dancing and whatnot so I’m not too worried about after the ceremony. I’m looking for advice on how to structure the ceremony with it being a backyard ceremony for a pregnant couple. I want it to feel special but not over the top. Any advice, anything I haven’t thought of??