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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

Every year I pay $39.99 for a one-month subscription for Punchbowl, which allows me to easily manage RSVP's for my son's birthday party.

For that price, you get the normal stuff you'd expect and also:

- no ads

- ability to set each invitee as an adult, a child or an infant (useful when planning food and activities)

- ability to group invitees into families, so that any adult in the family can edit the RSVP for any/all family members

- single place to manage all messages with attendees

- easy to start this year's invitation as a copy of last year's

- app that displays the total 'yes' folks, split by adult, child, infant

It's totally worth the money for the time it saves and the ease of use for guests.

But I'm surprised that AFAIK there's no open source thing that's as easy to use, and that includes all the features I listed.

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You should try out Lu.ma - it does all those things for free. I use it extensively for managing rsvps to both private and public events.

I just signed up to try it out, but I don't see either of these features:

  - ability to set each invitee as an adult, a child or an infant
  - ability to group invitees into families, so that any adult in the family can edit the RSVP for any/all family members

What would be the use case for that? Do people really (want to) manage their RSVP in that much detail?

Otherwise, you have to choose: either you invite one adult from the household, but then the other may be unaware of the event details, or you invite both, but then you must rely on them to discover it to avoid a scenario where they both RSVP for themselves and a partner and a kid, and you end up double counting.

Invitee age group: - kids need less food than adults

- adults don't need nerf guns

- kids and adults have different drink preferences.

Ability to group invitees into families:

- whichever parent is 'in charge' of plans for that weekend can respond

- whichever parent realises there's a change of plans can edit one or more of the RSVPs

- often a family will accept/decline differently for different members, e.g. older sibling isn't interested, or one parent will run errands whilst the other is at the party

1. Custom ticket types. 2. Group tickets I guess is the best version of this? As in you can add +1s to your ticket. Otherwise this is not something they provide.

Right, so AFAICT there's nothing free which provides the features for which I pay punchbowl.

Every event I've hosted or been invited to was just a group chat on Telegram. Add everyone who is invited, create a pinned message with the details and a poll with yes/no/maybe.

That would require at least one adult from each family to have Telegram, which isn't the case.

And a poll wouldn't allow me to know which kid(s) and adult(s) from each family are coming.

How does it work with various modes of communicating? Pretty much each person I know has their own messenger service, or sometimes just the phone or seeing them in person.

Each invited family must have at least one person with an email address OR cellphone number.

I guess that works in some cultures. I've organized a party for my kid and it was all hand-delivered invitations. I don't know half those parents' email addresses or phone numbers because that's not how we communicate. Sometimes I don't even know them at all have to ask around "Who's Johnny's mum?".

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