Terms of service

Last updated October 2, 2026

These cover the Special Vows wedding app at specialvows.app — what you get, what we promise, and what we do not. Plain English on purpose. If a sentence here is unclear that is our problem, not yours, and you can write and ask.

Who you are buying from

Special Vows is a trading name of Gold Standard Web LLC, registered at 7530 39th Avenue, Kenosha, WI 53142, United States. Payment is taken by Stripe on our behalf. These terms are governed by the law of the State of Wisconsin.

specialvows.com — our wedding reference site — has its own separate terms covering the print files sold there. This page is only about the app.

What you are buying

Planning is free. The checklist, the budget, the guest list, seating, the vendor questions and the day-of timeline cost nothing, for as long as you use them.

$19, paid once, opens your wedding app to your guests, with your photos hosted for 12 months: the guest hub, the schedule, RSVPs and meal counts, the photo wall, the guest book, games, the printable packs and your public wedding website — every guest feature switched on in the product at the time you buy, for one wedding.

Kate is a subscription: $6.99 a month or $49 a year, and includes everything in the paragraph above. It renews automatically at the end of each month or year, at the price you subscribed at, until you cancel. Cancel any time from Settings → Manage subscription: you are not charged again, Kate stays until the end of the period you have paid for, and your wedding and guest app stay as they are. If you bought Kate for $49 once before October 2, 2026, you keep her for as long as your wedding is with us, with no subscription.

Buying in the iPhone app. In the iPhone app you buy the same plans through your Apple ID, at Apple’s prices: Kate $6.99 a month or $49 a year, the guest app $19. Apple takes the payment and renews a Kate subscription until you cancel it at least 24 hours before the period ends, in Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions. Refunds for these go through Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com.

Your guests never pay anything and never need an account. There is no per-guest charge, no guest limit, and no advertising shown to guests.

There are optional extras, each bought separately and none of them required: Your own web address ($39), Keep your photos forever ($29), Printed photo book ($89), Edited video guest book ($99), Remove Special Vows branding ($19), Extra photo storage ($19), Premium website layouts ($15), A password on your website ($9). Nothing in the base app is withheld to sell you one of these.

Kate

Kate is an AI planning assistant. She works from your wedding as you have entered it and answers from that, from prices businesses in your city publish, and from what counties and states publish about marriage licences — each quoted with where it came from and when it was checked.

What she tells you can be wrong or out of date. A county changes its fee, a venue changes its prices, a figure was read from a page that has since moved. Check anything that matters — a deadline, a fee, a legal requirement — with the source before you rely on it. She shows you the source so that you can.

She does not give legal, financial or contract advice. She can tell you what a statute or a county publishes. She cannot tell you whether a particular person may marry you, whether to sign a contract, or what one means.

She never sends anything, spends anything or books anything. She drafts; you send. She changes nothing in your plan until you press Yes on the change she has written out, and what she remembers about you is listed on her page, where you can delete it.

To keep her running for everyone she answers up to 40 questions a day and 800 for a whole wedding. She depends on an outside AI service (see the privacy policy); if it is down, she is too, and nothing else in the app is affected.

Your own web address

If you buy “your own web address” ($39), we register the .com you choose in Gold Standard Web LLC’s account at our registrar, with WHOIS privacy on, for one year from the day you buy, and connect it to your wedding app.

It is yours to take. Ask at any time during that year and we will transfer the name to you, free.

After the year it lapses unless you renew it with us. We will email you before it does. Once a name lapses, anyone can register it.

If we cannot register the name you picked — someone took it first, or it no longer costs what it did — we refund you in full, automatically.

Photo hosting, stated honestly

When you buy, we record a date twelve months ahead. That is the period we undertake to host your photographs for.

At the end of it we delete the photographs, and we mean it. They go from our servers and cannot be recovered. Your guest list, schedule, seating plan and guest book stay where they are — it is the photo hosting that has a term, not the app.

You get a month’s warning by email before anything goes, and nothing is deleted less than a month after that warning was sent. If we cannot reach you, we do not delete: the warning has to have actually gone out before the deletion is allowed to happen, so a bounced email buys you time rather than costing you photographs.

Two ways to keep them, either fine. Download everything as one zip at full resolution — that button is in the app from the day you buy and always works, warning or no warning. Or buy “Keep your photos forever” and the expiry is removed altogether.

What we do not promise

We do not check anything you type. Your names, your date, your venue, your times, your seating plan and your menu are printed and shown exactly as you enter them. We have no way to know your ceremony moved to five o’clock or that the venue spells its name differently. Read the printables before you take them to a printer.

We do not guarantee the venue has signal. The app is built to keep working offline and it does — the schedule, the seating, the venue details and anything already loaded stay available, and a photo taken with no signal uploads when there is some. But a feature that genuinely needs the network when you use it, needs the network.

We do not promise uninterrupted service. We run on Netlify and Neon and depend on them. We will not schedule maintenance on a Saturday.

What you are responsible for

• Your guest list. You are entering other people’s names, emails, phone numbers, postal addresses and dietary requirements. You need a proper reason to hold those, which at a wedding you invited them to you plainly have — but they are your guests and the responsibility for what you put in is yours. See the privacy policy for what we do with it, and what a guest can ask us for.
• What gets posted. Guests can upload photographs and write in the guest book. You can set photos to need your approval before they appear, and you can remove anything at any time. We do not moderate your wedding.
• Keeping your link sensible. A wedding can be open to anyone with the link, or locked behind a code you set. That choice is yours and it is in the settings.

What we can do

We can remove content or close an account that is being used to break the law, to harass somebody, or to host material that has nothing to do with a wedding. We would rather write to you first, and normally will.

Your content stays yours

You own your photographs, your writing and your guest list. We store and display them in order to run the app for you, and for nothing else. We do not use your photographs in our marketing. We do not train anything on them. We do not sell them or pass them to anyone except the services listed in the privacy policy, which exist to make the app work.

Refunds

On their own page, because they deserve a plain answer: how refunds work.

If we change these

We will change this page when the product changes, and the date at the top will say when. If a change materially affects something you have already paid for, we will email you rather than quietly editing the page.

Getting hold of a person

hello@specialvows.com, or by post at the address in the footer. A person reads it.