The Free Wedding Guest List and RSVP App Built for Desi Weddings

Manage a 300-guest desi guest list and per-event RSVPs for free. Import contacts, tag by event and side of family, track dietary, export a caterer headcount.

By Mia · 2026-06-22

Yes — you can manage your entire desi wedding guest list and collect RSVPs for free, and the only thing you ever pay for is texting guests over SMS (your first 15 texts are free, then a one-time $49 unlocks unlimited — no subscription, ever).

Most guest-list apps quietly assume one ceremony, one reception, one Saturday. A desi wedding is not that. You might have 300 guests, both sides of the family, and a Mehndi, Sangeet, Haldi, Baraat, ceremony, and reception spread across three or four days — and Auntie is coming to the reception but not the Haldi. Cordially Wed is a free, self-serve app built specifically for that: per-event guest lists, per-event RSVPs, dietary tracking, and a clean caterer headcount you can hand off without a single spreadsheet.

This is a guide for you, the couple, doing this yourselves (with family weighing in, of course). Here's exactly how to go from a pile of contacts to a tracked, RSVP'd, dietary-tagged guest list — and what genuinely costs nothing versus the one thing that doesn't.

What's actually free — and the one thing that isn't

Let's be direct about money first, because "free" apps usually aren't. With Cordially Wed, the guest-list and RSVP core is free with no asterisk:

• Building your guest list — unlimited guests, whether you have 80 or 800
• Per-event RSVPs for every function (Mehndi, Sangeet, Haldi, Baraat, ceremony, reception)
• Dietary tracking, tags, and CSV import/export
• Your multi-day timeline, budget, seating chart, Apple Wallet + Google Wallet passes, and a wedding website

The single paid thing is texting guests over SMS. Your first 15 SMS messages are free. After that, a one-time $49 unlocks unlimited SMS for your whole wedding — that's it, no monthly fee, no per-message charge, no subscription that auto-renews after the big day.

And you can avoid even that if you want. Every guest's RSVP link is just a link. You can drop it into a WhatsApp family group, send it over iMessage from your own phone, or paste it into an Instagram DM — all free. Plenty of desi couples never pay anything because WhatsApp is already where the whole family lives. The $49 is there for the moment you'd rather have the app text 200 people a reminder for you instead of copy-pasting a link 200 times.

You also don't need an account to start. You can build the skeleton of your whole wedding — names, events, dates — in about a minute, then create an account to save it.

Getting 300 contacts in without typing them one by one

Nobody is hand-typing 300 names. You have two fast ways in.

• CSV import — if you already have a spreadsheet (or you're moving off Zola or The Knot), export it to CSV and upload it. Cordially Wed reads name, phone number, and tags, with a progress bar as it imports. There's a short built-in walkthrough that shows you exactly how to export your list from Zola or The Knot, so you're not guessing at column names.
• Contact import — pull names and numbers straight from your phone's contacts so you're not re-typing the cousins you already text every week.

A realistic way to do this with both families: have your side and your partner's side each build a quick spreadsheet — name, phone, and a column for which side of the family they're on — then import both. Say Priya's family sends over 160 names and Raj's sends 140. You upload both files, and in a couple of minutes you have all 300 in one place instead of two spreadsheets that disagree with each other.

Duplicates and re-imports are handled gracefully — if you upload an updated file later, matching guests are merged by phone rather than doubled, so you won't end up with two Priyas.

Tagging by event and by side of the family

This is where a desi-specific tool earns its keep. Two kinds of tags do almost all the work, and you can apply them in bulk so you're never editing 300 rows one at a time:

• By event — who's invited to what. Close family and the bridal party might be on the Haldi and Sangeet lists; the wider circle of 300 is on the ceremony and reception. Tag people accordingly so each function has its own guest list and its own headcount.
• By side of the family — a simple "Bride side" / "Groom side" tag (or by family, or by city) so you can see balance at a glance, sort the seating chart later, and know whose relatives are still missing an RSVP.

You can mix in any tags that fit your wedding — VIP, Family, Friends, Plus One, Mumbai, London, Toronto. Then you filter. Want everyone on Raj's side who's invited to the Sangeet but hasn't RSVP'd yet? That's a saved filter you can pull up in two clicks and, when the time comes, text or message that exact group rather than blasting all 300.

This is also the honest gap with Zola and The Knot: they're built for a single Western wedding day, so they can't give each of your functions its own guest list and its own RSVP. With multiple events, per-event tagging is the whole game, and it's why a general tool ends up fighting you.

Per-event RSVPs and dietary, without the spreadsheet

Each guest gets an RSVP link tied to the events they're invited to. They tap "Joyfully Accept" or "Regretfully Decline," and — if they're attending — they tell you their dietary needs right there. You watch responses land in real time on your dashboard: confirmed, declined, still pending, broken out so you can see, for example, that the Sangeet is at 180 yes / 40 pending while the reception is nearly full.

Dietary is built for how desi families actually eat. You can track Pure Veg, Jain, Halal, Kosher, vegan, gluten-free, nut and other allergies — not just a single "vegetarian?" checkbox. When Priya's Jain grandparents and Raj's Halal-observing relatives are at the same reception, that detail is captured per guest, per event, instead of living in someone's memory.

Guest replies don't scatter across your inbox, either. When you do message guests — over WhatsApp or SMS — their responses come back into one unified inbox, so the "wait, are we 6 or 8 at our table?" and "can we bring the kids to the Mehndi?" questions are all in one thread you can actually answer.

Exporting a clean caterer headcount

When the caterer asks for final numbers, you don't want to count rows in your head. Filter your list to a single event — say, the reception — and to RSVP status "attending," and you have your confirmed count instantly. Add the dietary column and you can see, in one view, how many Pure Veg, Jain, Halal, and allergy plates you need for that function.

Then export to CSV. You get a clean file — names, RSVP status, dietary — that you can hand to the caterer or the venue exactly as they want it, per event. So the Sangeet kitchen gets the Sangeet count and the reception kitchen gets the reception count, each with its own dietary breakdown, instead of one muddled total for "the wedding."

Because every event has its own list, you can do this function by function in a few minutes each, the week before, when the final stragglers have finally replied.

That's the whole loop: import your 300, tag them by event and by family, send links (free over WhatsApp, or unlock unlimited SMS for a one-time $49), watch the RSVPs and dietary roll in, and export a caterer-ready headcount per function. You can start building your wedding free at cordiallywed.com — it takes about a minute, and you don't need an account to begin. Get the guest list in tonight; the rest of the planning is sitting right there, free, whenever you're ready for it.