The three confidence labels
Every price on Under the Veil carries one of three labels. The label tells you exactly how much trust to place in the number. We never mix them, average across them, or hide them from you.
Receipt-backed
A real bride or groom uploaded a receipt, contract, or invoice. A human reviewer at Under the Veil opened the document, confirmed the number matches what's on the page, and approved it. Then the document is deleted. This is the highest tier of trust we offer.
Bride-submitted
A real person submitted what they paid through our submission form, but didn't attach a receipt. Reviewed by a human for plausibility before publishing. Less rigorous than verified, but still grounded in lived experience rather than marketing copy.
Public data
Pulled from a venue or vendor's own website, an industry survey (Zola, The Knot, WeddingWire, Fidelity), or a regional wedding publication. These are starting prices, asking prices, or industry averages — almost always lower than what real couples actually pay.
When you see two prices for the same venue with different labels, the verified one always sits higher in the rollup, even if the aggregated number is the lower of the two. Reality wins over marketing copy. Always.
Where the data comes from
Our index pulls from four kinds of sources, in roughly this order of trust:
- Bride and groom submissions through our submission form. The most trusted source because it's a person telling us what they paid for their own wedding. Verified or self-reported depending on whether they attached a receipt.
- Venue and vendor websites that publish their own pricing. We use a polite scraper that respects
robots.txt, identifies itself by name, and never makes more than one request per three seconds per domain. Tagged "aggregated." - Regional wedding blogs and trade publications with editorial cost breakdowns — Woman Getting Married, Heart of NC Weddings, Here Comes The Guide, Venue Report, and similar. Vetted allowlist; we only scrape sources that publish verifiable, citable price information.
- Public bride conversations on Reddit via the official Reddit API. Threads in r/weddingplanning, r/weddingsunder10k, and r/WedditNYC where couples voluntarily share their budget breakdowns. Tagged "self-reported" because the original poster didn't intend to submit to us, but we attribute every pull back to the source thread.
Every observation in our database stores the source URL and the original quote that yielded the number. You can see this on any venue or vendor page in the "Sources" section, and you can click through to verify the original.
What "verified" means
"Verified" is our most trusted label, and we mean something specific by it. Here's the actual chain:
A real person submits a receipt
Through our submission form. PDF, JPG, or PNG. Up to 10 MB. No account needed.
The document goes into a moderation queue
It is not yet visible on the public site. The submitter sees a "pending review" confirmation.
A human reviewer opens the document
They check three things: that it's a real receipt or contract, that the number on the document matches the number the submitter typed, and that the venue or vendor name matches an existing or plausibly new entry in our index.
If everything checks out, we approve and publish
The price observation enters the public database with the "Verified" badge. The venue or vendor's headline price updates immediately if the new submission outranks existing data.
The receipt is deleted
We keep only the extracted number, the wedding month, the guest count, and a verification flag. The original document is destroyed within 48 hours of approval. We do not store, index, or retain the file beyond what's needed to confirm the number.
What "verified" does not mean: that the price is the lowest available, that it's typical for that venue, or that you'll be quoted the same number. It means one specific person paid this specific amount for this specific wedding, and we have evidence to back it up.
How submissions are reviewed
Every submission — whether or not it includes a receipt — passes through a human review queue before it appears on the public site. This is non-negotiable. Without it, the data quality collapses within a week of any meaningful attention from competitors or pranksters.
The reviewer asks three questions:
- Is this plausible? A $400,000 wedding at a small barn venue is suspicious. A $600 photographer for a 200-person wedding is suspicious. We don't reject based on outliers alone — luxury weddings exist, and so do incredible deals — but extreme outliers get held for follow-up rather than approved on the spot.
- Does this match an existing record? If the submitter typed "Calamigos Ranch" and we already have a Calamigos Ranch in Malibu, we attach the new observation to that record instead of creating a duplicate. This is the most important step for keeping the data clean.
- Is there a receipt? If yes, the submission becomes "Verified." If no, it becomes "Self-reported." Both are real categories with real value — we just label them differently so you can decide how much weight to give each.
Reviewers can also reject submissions outright. Reasons we reject: obvious test data, clearly fabricated numbers, vendor self-promotion (a vendor submitting their own pricing should use the vendor claim flow instead), and submissions that include personal information about anyone other than the submitter.
Rejected submissions are archived, not deleted. We keep them so we can audit our own review decisions if a submitter contests a rejection.
Privacy & redaction
Submitting wedding cost data is personal in a way that submitting a Yelp review is not. Receipts often contain your full name, your fiancé's full name, a home address, a credit card number, sometimes a social security number or driver's license. We take this seriously.
Here is what we do, in order:
- We never publish your name. Submissions appear on the public site as "verified bride" with the wedding month and city only. We do not show your initials, your partner's initials, or any identifying detail.
- Receipts are auto-redacted before any human reviews them. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and signatures are blurred or blacked out by an automated process before the document enters the moderation queue. The reviewer sees the line items and the totals — nothing else.
- Receipts are deleted after verification. We keep the extracted price, the wedding month, the guest count, and a flag indicating verification happened. The document itself is destroyed within 48 hours.
- Email addresses are optional and never shared. If you provide an email, we use it only to follow up on a specific submission if a reviewer needs to confirm a detail. We do not add it to a marketing list, sell it, or use it for anything else.
- You can request deletion at any time. Email [email protected] with the wedding month and city you submitted, and we will remove the observation from the public index within 48 hours, no questions asked.
Corrections & contests
If you find a number on Under the Veil that's wrong — whether you're a bride who notices a typo, a vendor whose listing has an outdated price, or a journalist fact-checking us — there are three ways to fix it.
If you're a bride or groom whose own submission is wrong: Email us with the wedding month and city. We will correct or remove the observation within 48 hours.
If you're a venue or vendor whose listing has incorrect pricing: Use the Vendor Claim flow. You can submit your current published pricing in exchange for a "Verified by venue" badge on your listing. We'll cross-check against any existing observations and update the page.
If you're anyone else: Click "Contest a number" on any venue or vendor page. Tell us which number you think is wrong and what the correct one should be. A reviewer will look at the original source citation, compare it to your correction, and either update the record or explain why we kept the original. Either way, you'll get a response.
We do not remove correctly-cited numbers because someone doesn't like them. If a venue's website published "$28,000 starting" in 2024 and they're embarrassed by that number now, the correct fix is to submit their 2026 pricing — not to ask us to delete the historical record. Price history matters; we keep it.
What we refuse to do
The choices we don't make are as important as the ones we do. Here is what Under the Veil will never do, no matter how much it would help our growth or our revenue:
What we will do
- Publish every cited source so you can verify any number
- Update prices when new evidence comes in, including evidence from vendors themselves
- Show you the methodology behind every aggregated number
- Reject submissions that look like vendor self-promotion
- Honor deletion requests within 48 hours, no questions asked
- Tell you which numbers are best-case starting prices and which are real spend
What we will not do
- Sell bride contact information to vendors. This is the entire revenue model of our largest competitors. We will not do it.
- Take payment from vendors to remove negative reviews or hide unflattering price data
- Take payment from vendors to boost their ranking in the leaderboard
- Scrape sites whose terms of service prohibit it (this means The Knot, WeddingWire, and Zola)
- Publish receipts, even after redaction, even with permission
- Reveal a submitter's identity to a vendor, ever, for any reason
The list on the right is the harder commitment. The wedding industry's standard business model is to be a lead-generation marketplace where vendors pay for placement and bride data is the inventory. We will not be that. If we cannot make Under the Veil work as a subscription product, a B2B data product, or a media business that runs ads against editorial content, we will not exist. We will not pretend to be a neutral data source while quietly selling brides to the highest bidder.
Disclosures & affiliations
Under the Veil is independent. We are not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any wedding venue, vendor, marketplace, or publication. We have no commercial relationships with Zola, The Knot, WeddingWire, Joy, Minted, or any of the industry data sources we cite.
We cite those sources because they have done real work to estimate industry averages, and because giving credit where it's due is part of being honest about where data comes from. Citing a source is not an endorsement of that source's methodology, and it is certainly not an indication that they endorse us.
If we ever take outside investment, accept sponsored content, or enter into a commercial relationship with a wedding industry company, we will disclose it on this page within 30 days of the agreement. If you are reading this and we have done none of those things, then we have done none of those things.
Last updated: April 8, 2026 · Version 0.4.1 · Beta