Ninety seconds. Once.
Most people perform this exact piece of writing exactly one time in their life, in front of everyone they love, with no second take. That is a strange amount of pressure to put on a blank page.
Free tools reach for "my whole world" because they have nothing else to reach for.
Type "wedding vows" into a general-purpose chatbot and you get something fluent back in seconds — and it is built almost entirely out of the same handful of phrases every set of vows on the internet already uses. "My rock." "My best friend." "The day my life began." None of it is wrong, exactly. It is just true of every couple who has ever gotten married, which means it is not really true of yours.
Your actual promises are more specific than that, and more interesting. Ask any long-married couple what they actually promised each other and you rarely get "to always be there" — you get something closer to "I'll always drive when it's raining," said once, at a wedding, decades ago, and repeated at every dinner party since. The specific, slightly ordinary promise is the one that survives. The grand, vague one is the one nobody remembers making.
So this job does not supply the material. It cannot invent how you met, a proposal story, or a promise you never actually made — and where it needs a detail you have not given it, it says so on the page rather than filling the gap with something plausible.
What it does with what you give it.
Eight short answers go in: who you are marrying, the moment you knew, three things about them nobody else quite sees, one thing that drives you mad, what you are actually promising, tone, ceremony type, and how long you can hold the room. Back come your vows, a 40-second cut for nerves, and a matching set of prompts for your partner.
Here is what a flat, ordinary promise becomes.
I'll always drive when it's raining. I'll tell you when there's coriander in it. When we're old and he finally finishes the shed, I'll act surprised.
I promise to always drive when it's raining. I promise to tell you when there's coriander in it. And when we're old, and you finally finish [ADD FACT: the shed — or has it become something else by then?], I promise to act surprised.
Notice what stayed exactly as given: the driving, the coriander, the acting surprised. None of it was replaced with something grander. The one flagged gap is a genuine one — a shed, twenty or thirty years from now, is the kind of detail worth double-checking before it is read aloud to a room that has heard the shed jokes for a decade.
How it works.
- Answer eight short questions. The promises answer matters most — write it in your own flat words, the way you would actually say it to them privately, not the way a vow "should" sound.
- Top up once and your vows are written. That funds your balance; this job is about 25p — never more than 40p and only ever charges what it actually used. Asking for a change is a fresh run and draws on the balance again too.
- Four things come back. The full vows, a 40-second version for if nerves take over, a set of prompts for your partner's own vows, and a short list of anything worth confirming before the day.
A run that fails to produce a result is never charged.
Who this suits.
Worth it if
- You have the true, specific details and cannot get them into something you would actually say out loud.
- You keep starting with "my rock" and deleting it, because it does not sound like either of you.
- You and your partner are writing separately and want some assurance you will not accidentally say the same thing.
- You have a slot of a specific length and need the vows to actually fit it.
Not worth it if
- You already have a full draft you like — this starts from answers, not from editing existing text.
- You want borrowed language from famous vows or poetry. It works from what you actually know about each other, not from a quotation bank.
- You have not thought about what you are actually promising yet. Fifteen minutes with the questions first will get you a much better result than answering them cold.
What people ask, usually the week before.
How long should vows actually be?
Give it a number of seconds — 60, 90 or 120 — and it writes to fit that, at roughly the pace a nervous person actually speaks. There is no correct length beyond what the officiant or celebrant has allotted you; ask whoever is running the ceremony what your slot is before you start.
We are writing separately and I don't want us to say the same thing.
You get a set of writing prompts alongside your own vows, angled deliberately at different territory than what you already covered. If your vows lean on one shared memory, the prompts nudge your partner toward a different promise or a different era of the relationship — not a guarantee against overlap, since nobody involved can see what the other actually writes, but a genuine attempt to reduce it.
Our ceremony is not religious. Will it assume it is?
No — it uses exactly the ceremony type you name: religious, civil, humanist, or your own. It will not insert religious language into a civil ceremony, and it will not strip it out of a religious one either.
I am not good with words and I am terrified.
That is most people, and it is exactly what the interview is built for — it asks for the moment you knew and a few plain promises, not literary phrasing. Plain and specific beats eloquent and vague every time in this genre; the questions are designed so you cannot give a bad answer, only a short one.
Can I use this if we already wrote something and it needs work?
This version starts from your answers rather than an existing draft, so if you have a full draft already it is usually faster to edit it yourself than to re-describe it here. It suits a blank page, not a redraft.
Do I have to memorise it, or can I read it on the day?
Reading it is completely normal and nobody in the room is judging you for holding a card. It is written in short, speakable sentences either way, so reading it aloud a few times beforehand is what actually matters, not memorising it word for word.
Ready to write it?
Have your promises worked out in plain words before you start — that is genuinely most of the work, and the questions will not write them for you.
Top up once. No subscription. About 25p — never more than 40p.