I Just Wanted to Throw a Party.

In 2024, I used Facebook Events to organize my annual holiday and birthday gathering.

It worked. Sort of.

The problem was figuring out what was actually happening on the other side of the invitation.

Had people seen it? Had they missed the notification? Did they RSVP and actually plan to come? Did they even check Facebook anymore?

Some of the people I wanted there weren’t on Facebook at all. Others technically had accounts but rarely opened them. And even for the people who did use Facebook, an invitation was competing with the pile of notifications, posts, groups, messages, and everything else Facebook wanted their attention for that day.

So I ended up doing exactly what a party planning tool was supposed to prevent.

I started chasing people down through texts, messages, and other apps just to figure out who was coming.

The guest list wasn’t really a guest list anymore. It was detective work.

When it came time to plan the gathering again in 2025, I already knew I didn’t want to use Facebook Events.

So I tried Evite.

It seemed like the obvious solution. It was built specifically for invitations, it had been around forever, and I figured this would finally make things simple.

Then I tried inviting more than 30 people.

The option I was looking at was going to cost me around $70.

For one party.

Absolutely not.

And even beyond the price, I didn’t want another bloated invitation experience filled with advertising and features I didn’t need. I wasn’t planning a conference. I wasn’t running an event company.

I was inviting people to a party.

I wanted to make something nice, send people one link, know who was coming, and have one place where everybody could find the details.

That shouldn’t be complicated.

I’m a creative director and lifelong tinkerer, and I’m the kind of person who has a hard time leaving a problem alone once I know there should be a better way to solve it.

So instead of finding another invitation app, I started building one.

Within a few weeks, I had a working prototype of PartyBird.

I used it for my own party, sent the invitations out, and watched real people use it.

And it worked.

Not perfectly. It was a prototype. But it did the thing I had wanted from the beginning: it gave my party one home.

I could invite people without caring whether they used Facebook. I could see the guest list and RSVPs without maintaining a spreadsheet. People had somewhere to go when they needed the details. And I didn’t have to turn a casual party into a miniature event-management operation.

That prototype became the starting point for PartyBird.

The more I worked on PartyBird, the more I realized the problem wasn’t really invitations.

Invitations are just where party planning starts.

After you invite everyone, you still have to figure out who’s coming. You may need to send reminders. Somebody needs the address again. Someone asks what they should bring. You might need a gift registry, a potluck list, a playlist, photos, tickets, or a way to check people in.

And almost every existing solution seemed to live at one of two extremes.

Either it was a simple invitation tool that stopped being useful once the invitation was sent, or it was event-management software built for people whose actual job is organizing events.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle.

I don’t think you should have to pay $70 just because your birthday party has a lot of friends.

That’s why the core of PartyBird is free.

Create your party. Send invitations. Collect RSVPs. Keep track of your guests. Send reminders. Keep the important details together.

If that’s all you need, great.

If you’re the person who plans everything, PartyBird has inexpensive upgrades that add more customization, automation, planning tools, photos, registries, supply lists, and other features.

And if you’re using PartyBird for an organization or more involved events, there are tools for that too.

The point isn’t to cram every possible feature into your party.

It’s to let PartyBird grow with the party when you need it to.

PartyBird is being built around a pretty simple principle: helping you plan a party shouldn’t require turning your guests into the product.

We don’t sell your personal information.

We don’t build advertising profiles from your party.

We don’t deliver ads that keep track of you — no following you around the internet, no trading your personal data to ad networks.

You might see the occasional party-related ad, there to make the experience better rather than to profile you. That’s as far as it goes.

We collect and use the information necessary to operate PartyBird, keep it secure, improve the product, and provide the features you choose to use. That’s what your information is for.

There is a slightly ridiculous irony to party planning.

You can spend so much time making sure everyone else has a good time that you barely get to have one yourself.

You’re checking responses. Answering questions. Sending directions. Following up with people. Keeping track of food. Updating the group chat. Taking pictures. Making sure everybody knows what’s happening.

And then suddenly the night is over.

PartyBird isn’t going to plan your party for you, and that’s not the goal.

The goal is to take enough of the managing off your plate that when your people finally show up, you can actually be with them.

Because the best party planning app should eventually get out of the way.

That’s what we’re building PartyBird to do.