Wedding budget tracker built for South Asian weddings

Anvaya ships with 16 categories preloaded the day you create your wedding: venue, catering, decor, attire, jewelry, photography, videography, entertainment, baraat logistics, sangeet and mehndi production, planner fees, gifts and trousseau, invitations and stationery, ceremony registrations and officiant, miscellaneous, and a contingency buffer. You do not start from a blank Excel sheet arguing with your mom about whether the dhol player goes under "music" or "entertainment." The categories are already there, with sensible sub-types underneath.

Each category opens into a list of line items you can tag by ceremony, vendor, contributor, and currency. Photography splits into mehndi coverage, sangeet coverage, ceremony coverage, and the reception edit; jewelry splits into bride, groom, and family-set lines so the mother-of-bride bangles do not vanish into a total. The point is not to constrain you — it is to stop you re-creating the same desi-specific structure every couple has had to build by hand for the last decade.

Realistic ranges come baked in. Full-day Bay Area multi-event coverage runs $8,000–$15,000 across two days. London sangeet stages run £6,000–£12,000 depending on flower-wall size. The category notes surface ranges like these so you can sense-check a vendor quote before signing. None of it is hardcoded — you can override every range, rename every category, and add the sub-line you need.

Every couple goes through the same exercise: what if we kept it to two hundred guests? What if we did three hundred? What if we went to four hundred and added the welcome dinner? In a spreadsheet, this is three copies of the same workbook with subtle drift between them. In Anvaya, it is a single "snapshot scenario" button. Save the current state. Tweak the guest count and the per-head catering. Save another. Tweak again. The scenarios live side by side and you can compare any two with a single click.

Deltas highlight automatically. A scenario at 300 guests vs 200 may add $14,000 in catering, $4,000 in florals, and $2,500 in transportation; the compare view shows exactly those deltas in red and green, ordered by absolute impact so the conversation focuses on the lines that matter. You can promote any scenario to "main" — the one the dashboard reports against — and demote it back without losing any of the others. The full history stays accessible so a decision made in March is still legible in September.

Scenarios share their funding sources, so you do not have to re-enter who is contributing what each time you spin up a new version. They share vendors too, so a deposit you have already paid the photographer carries across all three guest-count scenarios — only the marginal costs (per-head food, per-table florals, the extra bus to the venue) change. The result: a single afternoon where the couple, both sets of parents, and a planner can sit down and have the "what size wedding can we afford" conversation with real numbers, not a guess and a wince.

A photographer emails a quote PDF. A decorator follows up with a revised proposal. A caterer responds with a per-head price after the tasting. In a normal planning flow, this is a daily inbox excavation followed by manual data entry into a spreadsheet two weeks later, by which point three of the numbers are stale and two are mis-typed. Anvaya replaces that loop. Forward the email tovendors-{your-subdomain}@anvaya.loveand the AI extracts the structured data — vendor name, contact, phone, website, category, quote amount, currency, ceremony, and a short summary of the notes — and proposes a vendor record plus a budget line for your review.

You see the extraction as a draft. Vendor name, quote, ceremony, and category each show with a confidence score. You accept, edit, or dismiss in one click. Accepting creates a vendor entry and a budget line in the right category, tied to the email you just forwarded so the audit trail is intact. Dismissing leaves nothing behind. The AI never writes to your workspace without your confirmation — every line that lands in the budget was approved by a human first.

The same flow handles PDFs and images. Drop a contract or a screenshot of a vendor's pricing slide into the workspace and the same extractor runs over it. The result: a budget that stays current with the actual quotes in your inbox, without a monthly spreadsheet-reconciliation Saturday. It is the wedge that turns email clutter into a budget line in under a minute, with a human approval step before anything saves.

Before you sign in, you want to know: is a 300-guest desi wedding in the Bay Area going to cost $150,000 or $400,000? The honest answer is "it depends" — and most online calculators dodge that by giving you a single national average. Anvaya uses per-city, per-guest-count starting ranges for Bay Area, New York and New Jersey, Toronto, and London. You see a range, not a single number, because the spread between a Jain-vegetarian mehndi caterer and a full-bar reception caterer is real.

The calculator is opinionated about what changes with guest count and what does not. Per-head catering scales. Decor and florals mostly scale. Photography, videography, planner, and attire do not — those are fixed regardless of whether you bring 200 or 400 guests. The result is a more honest mental model than the flat-rate "cost per guest" figure you see on most wedding-cost articles. We surface the ranges next to the same 16 categories you would track inside Anvaya, so the calculator output maps one-to-one onto your real planning workspace the moment you create an account.

The ranges are guidance, not a price list — your actual numbers come from your actual vendor conversations. But for a couple at the front end of planning, the calculator is the difference between a hand- wavy "weddings are expensive" conversation and a real starting point that says "a 300-guest Bay Area wedding with four events runs roughly $220,000–$340,000 before contingency." That is the conversation your parents wanted to have anyway.