Corporate event invitation budget: what you pay for

Three weeks before the company dinner, someone asks what the invitations cost. You have the invoice from the print shop — thick card, envelopes, stamps — but not the two evenings you spent messaging 80 people one by one, and not the second print run after the cocktail moved from 7pm to 8pm. Those are the lines a corporate event invitation budget usually forgets.

A digital invitation from Send The Joy costs €29.99 per invitation and you pay once — no subscription, nothing to renew. If you are weighing this against printed corporate invitations, here is the whole bill, side by side.

What a corporate event invitation budget leaves out

Paper is one line on the spreadsheet. The expensive parts turn up later, and they don't feel like costs while you are paying them.

• Card, envelopes and postage — plus a courier if the date is close and the invitations cannot be late.
• The hours spent writing to guests one by one, with replies landing across three different phones.
• A new print run every time you move the time, the room or the dress code.
• Translation, if some guests or delegations read in another language.

Three ways to invite people to a company event, and what each one costs

A PDF or an image over WhatsApp costs nothing until you start collecting answers. They arrive as loose messages — yes, maybe depending on the flight, count me plus one — and you end up building the guest list by hand.

An email from a marketing platform usually runs on a monthly subscription, and the guest receives a generic email instead of a page with their time, their map and their form. A web page built for the event works differently: €29.99 per invitation as a one-time payment, no subscription, with the online RSVP inside the invitation and the answers landing in one ordered list. You can edit the cover for free in test mode; buying unlocks all the linked scenes. Up to 6 of your own photos, music, and RSVP questions you set yourself. The site runs in seven languages — Spanish, English, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese and German — and the invitation content can be set per language, so one budget covers several delegations.

Compare the whole bill, not the price of the card. The difference shows up in the reprints and in the hours spent chasing replies.

Print a few copies, or none at all

Paper hasn't disappeared, and pretending otherwise would be silly. For the people who will keep the invitation as an object, a small printed run works — as a keepsake, not as the channel. The sensible setup is a link for everyone and a handful of copies for the few who will store them. What you cannot do is open a digital invitation without a phone, tablet or computer with a connection; if your guests don't have one, print stays the main route. Price the whole thing before you decide. At €29.99 per invitation, paid once, you can try the cover for free and judge it with the invitation on screen.