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Free Partiful alternatives and what they cost your guests

Partiful is free to host on, and its invites look better than anything else on this page. Your guests pay instead. Every one of them types in a phone number and sends back an SMS code before the RSVP counts, and Partiful says that holds even for the people you invited by email. If that is the part you want out of, the free options in September 2026 are Luma, a plain Google Calendar invite, a WhatsApp group event, and the hosted events I built into Will U Be There. Apple Invites is free to answer and costs the host an iCloud+ subscription. Evite puts ads inside the invitation your guests open. At Punchbowl there is no free tier at all.

The thread this page is answering

r/partyplanning, 26 August 2025. A thread called Partiful Alternatives?, 18 upvotes and 52 comments, opened with one reason:

"want to find an alternative to Partiful considering some of the potential security and ethics stuff"

The replies name Evite, Apple Invites, Paperless Post and RealEvents. No prices, no reading of anybody's privacy policy, nothing about where the data sits. Four months later, r/CasualConversation had the same complaint from the other end:

"Facebook Events are ended (no one checks them). Group Chats are messy (the invite gets buried under 50 memes). Calendar Invites feel too corporate/serious for a party. Does anyone else feel like we lost the 'middle ground'?"

One reply in the same thread:

"I just want a simple way to send a link that says 'Here is the plan, here is the time'"

I wrote the wider version of that story in what to use now that Facebook Events is dead. This page is narrower. It is about the app that has become the American default for this, and about what that app asks of the people you invite.

Is Partiful actually free?

The homepage says so twice, in two arrangements of the same claim: "100% free, no paywalls. Customize the perfect invite." and "Customize the perfect invite. 100% free, always." The App Store listing for version 3.8.28 says "Free with In-App Purchases", on a 185 MB download carrying an 18+ age rating. The help centre reconciles the two sentences: "Partiful's core platform is free to use. You can choose to pay for optional features like premium invite designs."

Ticketing costs extra, and Partiful will not print a figure for that either. The fee page hands you a shape with no numbers in it: "Ticketing fees depend on your event size and ticket price. Hosts will always be able to see the fees when they are configuring their event, and can choose to incur the fees themselves or pass on to guests." A ticketing vendor's own blog quotes a specific per-ticket cut that Partiful has never published anywhere I can find, so it is staying out of this page. For a birthday with no tickets on the door, free is accurate.

What your guests hand over

Partiful documents the RSVP flow itself: "You'll be asked to enter your name and your phone number in order to verify your RSVP... you'll get a code texted to your number. Enter that code in the popup in order to verify your number." Email does not route around it. From a separate help article: "Guests will still need to log in with their phone number in order to RSVP, even if they were invited via email."

Four uses are listed for that number: logging in, "to send automatic text reminders", "to allow you to easily communicate with guests by text blasting", and "To send events that you or their Mutuals invite them to." That last one is how somebody you have never met reaches your phone. Partiful explains it without blinking: "Any Mutual (aka someone you've partied with before!) can invite you to an event through Partiful."

Contact sync exists, and the limit Partiful puts on it is better than I expected. "When you sync your phone contacts to invite friends to events, we only store the contacts you're inviting, not your whole address book." That is a real constraint, and they published it where anyone can hold them to it.

Then there is the line in the privacy policy, last updated 19 August 2026: "We do work with advertising partners, with whom we may share personal information, and who may collect and use certain personal information to deliver more relevant advertisements." Opting out runs through a "Your Privacy Choices" link the policy says exists "in certain geographies", or through Global Privacy Control. The same company also states, flatly, "We will never sell your or your guest's data." Both sentences can be true together. Handing data to an ad partner is a different act from selling it. Whether that difference matters to you is your call, and Partiful does at least put both sentences somewhere you can read them.

Collection starts in the United States: "You will provide personal information directly to our Services in the United States." The policy reserves other jurisdictions on top of that, for affiliates and service providers. Europeans get an Article 27 representative (EDPO) rather than European hosting, which is a legal contact point and not a data location. Apple's privacy label for the iOS app lists Contact Info, Contacts, User Content, Identifiers, Usage Data and Diagnostics under Data Linked to You.

On 4 October 2025 TechCrunch reported that Partiful was not stripping EXIF GPS coordinates out of uploaded photos, public profile pictures included, and verified it with their own test upload. Co-founder Joy Tao said the flaw was "already on our team's radar, and was recently prioritized as an upcoming fix." TechCrunch confirmed the fix days later. It should also never have shipped in the first place, in a product whose entire job is putting the address of somebody's home in front of a guest list.

Partiful was founded in 2019, raised a $20M Series A in 2022 led by a16z, took Google's Best App of 2024, made the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list in 2025, and ships on iPhone and Android. The design is the best in the category by a distance, and I am not arguing otherwise anywhere on this page.

The eight options, compared

What the free ones give you, and where they stop

Every price below was read off the vendor's own page on 6 September 2026.

Luma's free tier is what I would point anyone at for something bigger than a dinner. Unlimited events, unlimited guests per event, guest check-in, blasts by email, SMS, push and WhatsApp, with a ceiling of 500 invites or newsletters per week. Charge for tickets and Luma takes 5 percent on the free tier, plus Stripe's cut. Luma Plus drops the platform fee and raises the weekly send to 5,000, at $59 a month billed annually.

A Google Calendar invite is free and reaches anyone with an email address, Google account or not, and they answer Yes, No or Maybe from inside the email. Google's caveat: "For the most reliable experience, use Google Calendar with your Google Account." It is also the option r/CasualConversation called too corporate for a party. That is a taste complaint. For a Tuesday board game night the plain thing does the job perfectly well.

WhatsApp Events arrived on 1 May 2024, first inside Community groups: "Anyone can create an event and others can respond so the whole group knows who is coming." Later updates added Maybe, plus-ones, end times and pinning. If the group chat already exists, creating the event takes a few taps inside it and nobody has to open anything else. That is also the limit. The address is whatever text you type into the event, and a person who is not in that group never sees the event at all.

Two lines from the Apple Invites listing decide whether it suits you: "Creation of invitations requires an iCloud+ subscription." and "Anyone can reply to invitations." So your guests answer for free from any phone, and you need an iPhone on iOS 18 or later plus a paid iCloud+ plan to make the thing in the first place. The app shipped on 4 February 2025 and reached version 1.11.0 on 18 August 2026, which added bulk email invitations. The Android half of a friend group has been here before. One of them, writing in r/apps in November 2025 in a thread comparing location-sharing apps, called it crying in Android: "My entire friend group uses Find My and I'm just... not there."

Evite's free tier shows ads inside the invitation your guests open. That is not my inference. Evite's own comparison page lists "No ads" as a Premium feature, sitting next to animated effects, exclusive designs, envelopes and stamps, a host photo gallery and the "Option to remove gift guides."

Punchbowl has no free plan. Every tier is a subscription behind a 7-day trial: Plus from $2.99 a month for 50 guests with advertising, Premium from $4.99 for 100 guests with advertising, Platinum from $5.99 for 500 guests and no advertising, Business from $39.99 for 5,000. Their help centre phrases the trial carefully: "you can send invitations for free during your trial period and you can cancel at any time."

Where Will U Be There fits in this list

I built the hosted-event half of the app because the other half kept producing the same next step. Two friends find out they are both in Berlin from the 12th to the 16th, the app tells them, and then somebody still has to propose a bar for the Thursday.

Pick the address off a map with autocomplete, set a date and a time, then send it to all your friends or to a couple of groups. People answer Going or Maybe, and you see the names rather than a count, which is the difference between booking a table for six and booking one for eleven. Everyone going gets a push reminder on the day and can open the venue in their own maps app. Events get a public link at willubethere.app/e/, group invites get one at willubethere.app/g/. It is free. There is no in-app purchase waiting anywhere in it.

It never receives your location, so nothing in it runs in the background collecting one. You type a city and two dates, and that is all it ever knows. A friend sees only the dates that overlap with theirs, never the rest of your trip list. Friend requests are the other thing people balk at, and a group link removes those: anyone with the link joins, up to 200 people in one group, and their trips match against yours without a request going either way. It has been on the App Store since March 2026, it is on Android too, and it speaks 17 languages.

Everything it stores is listed on the privacy page. The database sits in Supabase in eu-west-1 in Ireland, and crash reports go to Sentry in Frankfurt. You sign in with Apple, Google, or a six-digit code emailed to you that dies after 15 minutes. No password to leak. Download it from the App Store or Google Play, or read what it does at willubethere.app.

Where it stops. Your guests need the app, which makes it a tool for a friend group or a ski week and a bad tool for a 300-person open invite off a poster. If you are selling tickets, or expecting a room full of people you have never met, use Luma. And if everybody you know owns an iPhone and you already pay for iCloud+, Apple Invites is prettier than what I built. If the install itself is the objection, I wrote about that separately in my friends won't download another app.

Two things I could not verify. One is Partiful's Google Play data-safety section: the package id I guessed returned a 404 and search gave me nothing usable, so the Apple privacy labels quoted above are the only first-hand ones on this page. The other is whether Partiful makes hosts verify a phone number the way it makes guests. The guest-side rule is written down on their help site in plain English, the host side I only found second-hand, so treat it as unknown until Partiful writes it down.