I’m a software engineer. I built the wedding tool I wished existed.

I’m an engineer with more than ten years of building software and products, and I plan things for a living. So when my own wedding started coming together, I assumed the planning would be the easy part. It wasn’t.

The spreadsheet that broke me

Within a month I had a budget in one spreadsheet, the guest list in another, the seating chart on paper, and roughly a dozen email threads with vendors who each kept asking me for the same handful of details. The date. The headcount. The venue address. The arrival time. The floor plan. Every small change — a new RSVP, a moved time slot — meant re-sending the same update to four different people and hoping I hadn’t missed one.

None of it was hard, exactly. It was just scattered. The information existed; it simply lived in too many places, owned by too many tools that didn’t talk to each other.

The real problem wasn’t planning — it was coordination

The average wedding involves well over a dozen vendors, and each one needs a slightly different slice of the same information. The photographer needs the ceremony timing. The florist needs venue access and the setup window. The caterer needs the final headcount and the vendor meals. The band needs to know when the first dance is. None of them need everything — but all of them need to be working from the same, current truth.

And here’s the part nobody tells you: the vendors mostly can’t see each other. The florist doesn’t know the caterer’s truck is arriving at the same loading dock. The DJ doesn’t know the photographer is using the only outlet near the stage. So the couple becomes a human switchboard, relaying logistics between people who have never spoken — on the one day they most want to be present.

Why none of the existing tools fit

I tried the popular apps. They’re genuinely good at what they’re built for — beautiful wedding websites, slick registries, big vendor directories. But every one of them treats the vendor as a listing or a lead to be sold, not as a person who logs in and works alongside you. The seating chart, where it existed, was something you exported to a PDF and emailed. Nothing let the couple and the vendors share one live plan.

“Most apps treat your vendors as ads. I wanted to treat them as part of the team.”

What I decided to build

So I built the tool I wished existed: one shared workspace for the whole wedding. The guest list, a visual seating editor, the budget, the vendors, a day-of run-sheet, documents, and messages — all in one place, owned by the couple, and shared with exactly the people who need it.

The couple invites their partner and family to collaborate. They add their booked vendors, who get a focused portal where they can see what’s relevant to them — the seating plan, the timeline, their tasks, the other vendors on the day — and nothing they shouldn’t.

The decisions I’m proudest of

• Free for couples. The whole planning workspace, always, with no paywalled features.
• Privacy by default. Vendors only ever see what you choose to share — never your budget, your prices, or your private notes.
• Vendors are first-class. They log in, they see the day coming, and they can coordinate with each other instead of through you.

Dogfooding it on my own wedding

Latido isn’t a hypothetical. I’m using it to plan my own wedding in September 2026. Building it against a real date — real vendors, a real guest list, a real seating chart that keeps changing — is the most honest product feedback there is. If a feature doesn’t earn its place in my own planning, it doesn’t ship.

If you’re planning a wedding, or you’re a vendor tired of chasing details across a dozen inboxes, I’d love for you to try it. It’s the tool I needed — and I think you might need it too.