Most software built for the wedding industry focuses on the couple — planning tools, venue search, guest lists. Almost nothing exists for the person standing at the front of the ceremony actually running the show.
Wedding officiants are running real businesses. They're managing dozens of weddings per year, drafting personalized ceremony scripts, tracking marriage license requirements that vary wildly by state, sending contracts, chasing deposits, and trying to deliver a meaningful ceremony — all while juggling tools that were never designed for their workflow.
That's why I built Solemnly.
The Problem: A Profession Without Purpose-Built Tools
Talk to any working officiant and you'll hear the same story. Ceremony scripts live in Google Docs. Wedding details are scattered across spreadsheets. Marriage license deadlines get tracked in calendar reminders — if they get tracked at all. Invoices go out through Square or PayPal or sometimes just Venmo. Contracts are PDFs emailed back and forth.
None of these tools talk to each other. Every wedding means context-switching between five or six different apps, and the risk of something slipping through the cracks is constant. Miss a license filing deadline? That marriage might not be legal. Forget to follow up on a deposit? That's revenue lost.
Officiants don't need another generic project management tool. They need software that understands their specific workflow — from the first inquiry to the filed marriage license.
What Solemnly Does
Solemnly is a complete practice management platform built specifically for wedding officiants. Every feature maps directly to something an officiant actually does.
AI Ceremony Drafting
Couples fill out a questionnaire — how they met, cultural traditions, tone preference, special mentions. Solemnly uses Anthropic's Claude to generate a personalized ceremony script in seconds. Not a template with blanks. A real draft that reflects the couple's story and the officiant's style.
The officiant can then refine it in a block-based editor with drag-and-drop sections, version history, and export to PDF or Word.
Marriage License Tracking
Every state has different requirements for marriage licenses — filing deadlines, pre-registration steps, witness rules, officiant credentials. Solemnly tracks all of it across all 50 states. Status tracking from "not started" through "filed," with email reminders before critical deadlines.
This alone saves hours of research per wedding and eliminates the risk of a compliance miss.
Bookings and Contracts
Inquiries come in through the officiant's public profile and flow into a dashboard. Send contracts with built-in e-signature. Track wedding status from inquiry through completion. Calendar view shows everything at a glance.
Invoicing and Payments
Create branded invoices, split payments into deposit and balance, and get paid via Stripe Connect — money goes directly to the officiant's bank account. Automated reminders for unpaid invoices. No more chasing payments.
Offline Script Delivery
Solemnly is a Progressive Web App. Ceremony scripts cache locally so officiants can read them at the altar without needing internet. Venues don't always have great Wi-Fi. This feature exists because I talked to officiants who'd been burned by it.
The Tech Stack
- Framework: SvelteKit 2 with Svelte 5 runes
- Database: PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM
- Auth: Better Auth (email/password + Google OAuth)
- Payments: Stripe subscriptions + Stripe Connect for officiant payouts
- AI: Anthropic Claude for ceremony drafting
- Email: AWS SES for transactional email
- Storage: AWS S3 / Cloudflare R2 for documents and exports
- Maps: Google Maps API for venue geocoding and timezone detection
- Deployment: Docker containerization with Node.js adapter
Design Decisions
The visual identity had to feel appropriate for the context — weddings, ceremonies, meaningful moments. That ruled out the typical SaaS look of bright blues and rounded corners.
Solemnly uses DM Serif Display for headings and DM Sans for body text. The color palette centers on warm bronze (#B07D3B) against dark neutrals (#2C2825). The result is something that feels professional and elevated without being stuffy.
The logo uses four overlapping geometric squares in a cross pattern — abstract enough to be versatile, structured enough to feel intentional.
Why Build It Myself
I could have taken this to a dev shop. But the value of building your own product is that you control every layer — the design language, the data model, the infrastructure decisions, the pricing. There's no translation loss between "what the product should do" and "what actually ships."
When an officiant tells me the license tracker needs a specific field for their state's requirements, I can ship that change the same day. When Stripe releases a new Connect feature, I can integrate it without waiting on a vendor's roadmap.
What's Next
Solemnly is live at solemnly.app with a 30-day free trial. Two plans — Starter at $29/month for officiants handling a handful of weddings, Pro at $49/month for full-time professionals who need unlimited AI drafting and analytics.
Solemnly is a product of Strode Media Co. If you're building a business that needs purpose-built software, let's talk.