I built a wedding planner that lives on your computer — here's why

I spent a weekend looking at digital wedding planners and noticed something. Almost every one of them, before they let you write down a single thing, wants three pieces of information: your name, your email, and your wedding date. After that they want a password. Then a phone number for "verification." Then your partner's email so they can sync. By the time you're entering the venue, you've handed your wedding details to a marketing system that's now going to email you for the next eighteen months.

I thought that was odd. So I built the opposite.

What it actually is

It's one HTML file. You open it in any browser. You type things in. The planner saves what you typed to your computer's local storage, the same place a website remembers you turned dark mode on. There's no signup, no account, no cloud, no syncing. Close the tab and reopen it tomorrow and everything's still there.

If you want a backup, click Export. You get a JSON file you can stash anywhere — Google Drive, iCloud, a thumb drive, an email to yourself. Need to restore? Click Import and pick the file. That's the whole architecture.

The planner has the tabs you'd expect: budget tracker, guest list with addresses, seating chart, vendors, gift log, to-do list, day-of schedule. None of that's novel. What's novel is that none of it lives on someone else's server.

Who it's for

If you've ever looked at a wedding website's Terms of Service and wondered who's reading your guest list, this is for you. If you don't want "sponsored vendor recommendations" landing in your inbox for the next year, this is for you. If you'd rather keep your wedding details on your own laptop than in a database belonging to a company you've never heard of, this is for you.

It's also for people who like owning the tool they're using. The file you download today will still work in five years. There's no API to deprecate, no servers that might shut down, no subscription that might change price. It's HTML and JavaScript, the same boring stack the entire web runs on.

Who it's not for

Let me be honest about the tradeoff. Because everything lives in your computer's local storage, the planner runs per-device. If you do most of your planning on a laptop and also want it on your phone, this isn't going to sync that for you. You'd export the JSON, AirDrop or email it to yourself, and import it on the other device. Lo-fi, but it works.

If you want phone-and-laptop sync without thinking about it, you want a hosted SaaS planner. Those exist. They take an account and an email address in exchange. Pick whichever tradeoff you'd rather make.

Why a single file

I've spent twenty-five years building software, and most of what I've built has been overengineered for the actual problem it was solving. A wedding plan isn't a multiplayer real-time collaboration challenge. It's a list of vendors, a guest count, a budget, and a handful of dates. You don't need a server, an account, an API, or a subscription to track that. You need a thing that opens, lets you type, and remembers what you typed.

So that's what this is. The whole product is one HTML file. You can open it offline. You can email it to yourself. You can copy it to a USB drive and hand it to your maid of honor. The data stays where the file is. One-time purchase — no subscription, no account, no expiration.

The privacy thing, plainly

Wedding data shouldn't be a marketing asset. The names and addresses of your closest 150 people, the breakdown of how you and your partner are spending money, the seating chart showing who you are and aren't putting next to each other. That's private information. It doesn't belong in someone else's CRM. It doesn't need to be backed up to a third party that reserves the right to "use aggregate data to improve our services."

The planner I built doesn't transmit anything anywhere. It can't. There's no server to talk to. The only network call your browser makes when you open it is loading the Cormorant Garamond font from Google Fonts, and even that's optional. It falls back to your system serif if you're offline. Everything else is local.

Where to find it

It's on my Etsy shop, SimplePlannerCo. Fourteen dollars. You download a ZIP, unzip it, double-click the HTML file. The included how-to PDF walks through every tab if you want a tour. Decide to stop using it? Delete the file. Nothing to cancel.

One simple thing for a wedding that's already complicated enough.