Save the Date

Our save-the-date postcards came in!

The print version of this has a lot more text on it, but I took out our contact info.

I knew I wanted to design them myself, so the cost came down to how I printed them. I thought about printing them myself, but between the cost of blank cards and ink cartridges, and the time spent in an inevitable fight with my printer trying to make it print double-sided cards, it just wouldn't be worth it.

I've printed things through Vistaprint before, and was happy with the results, so I decided they were the least expensive route. The trick to Vistaprint is that you should NEVER pay full price. If you sign up for their emails, you can usually get 35-50% off if you're willing to wait a week or two for your particular item to go on sale.

A few weeks ago, I ordered their free wedding sample packet (which I recommend if you are thinking about ordering through them. Gives you a great idea of what to expect, and a steady flow of coupons and sales). Since then, my emails from them have been mostly wedding related, which is both useful and a pleasant change of pace from the usual emails they send me, which are about stickers to cover the entire side of my car to promote my knit design business (not the most effective marketing tool for knitting patterns, but a nice try) and free loyalty cards (as in buy 10 cups of coffee, get one free, but for knitting. Also not effective). They sent me an email announcing their "secret" bridal sale, and since we had just gotten our date from the church, I jumped on the opportunity. They came out exactly how I wanted them to!

Here's the breakdown:

1. We are only sending save-the-dates to family members, members of the wedding party, and people who we definitely want to come but live far away. This cuts down on the number we have to order. I ordered 50, to have a few extras in case I made mistakes addressing them. Normally $32.99 for 50, I got them for $21.24.

2. When I designed the postcard, I purposely made the back in grayscale. Vistaprint does not charge any extra to print in black and white on the back side of the card, so I avoided a fee that way.

3. Vistaprint's save-the-dates are not necessarily postcards, I just designed ours that way. But because that is not the standard, they include free white envelopes with the order. This saves money later on, because we can use them for thank you notes, RSVP returns, etc.

4. Shipping was free. They said it would take two weeks for them to come in, which was fine because I was in no hurry and the faster options were expensive. I placed the order and got them six days later. Seriously. Seven-day shipping costs $13.68, and I got them in less time for free. Don't pay for shipping unless you actually need them, like, the next day.

5. This is the one downfall: by designing them myself, I was charged uploading fees for the front and the back images, because I didn't use their designs. The two fees together only came to around $7, and I decided I had saved enough money on the sale that I could justify it. There were no designs on the site that went with our colors, or our idea of the wedding as a whole (which, admittedly, is a sparse and sporadic vision right now).

Including tax, (but not including the cost of actually mailing the postcards, which I will include later when I figure it out), the postcards came out to $27.72.


Money Spent: $27.72
Money Left to Spend: $4972.28