Fifteen years of vendor contracts, from both sides of the table. Now we read them for couples, so they don’t have to.
When Liz and I got engaged, the vendor contracts started showing up. And then they kept showing up — venue, photographer, caterer, band, florist, planner — each one a dense PDF, each one written by the vendor’s lawyer, each one quietly unfair in a different way.
The photographer’s contract granted them ownership of every image from our wedding. We could purchase prints. We couldn’t own our own day. That’s blasphemy, and it’s in almost every photo and video contract we’ve read since.
The caterer’s per-person price was already steep, and then there was a separate line for “vendor meals” — at a premium. We were being charged a markup to feed the people we were already paying to be there. It’s not illegal. It’s just an unnecessary money grab, written into the paper where most couples won’t argue with it.
That kept happening. Every contract had something — not illegal, just quietly unfair, written on the assumption the couple wouldn’t push back. I’d been on both sides of that table: fifteen years in corporate account management, redlining vendor contracts alongside legal counsel, and years on the events side running sales and operations for a live brass band that played weddings across the country. I knew these things were negotiable. Most couples don’t.
So we started Bindly. We read the contract, flag what’s unfair, and hand back plain-English edits and the exact script to ask for them. That’s the whole product.
On the corporate side, Shawn spent fifteen years in enterprise account management, reviewing and negotiating service agreements alongside legal counsel. The work built a specific kind of pattern recognition: how to identify definitions written broadly enough to mean almost anything, liability caps designed to look standard while protecting only one party, and performance clauses that transferred risk so gradually the client rarely noticed until something went wrong. That training came from commercial agreements far larger than a photographer’s contract or a florist’s quote, but the structural techniques repeat across every service industry.
On the events side, Shawn ran sales and operations for a live brass band that performed at weddings across the country. That put him on the vendor side of these same agreements — and showed him precisely what vendors expect couples to overlook. He saw which protections vendors write into their standard templates, which terms they count on clients not to push back on, and which clauses disappear quietly when a knowledgeable client asks. Seeing both sides of the same negotiation is not something most people accumulate over a weekend of wedding planning.
That combination is what Bindly is built on. Couples typically sign five to eight vendor contracts in the months before their wedding — often the largest service agreements they have ever signed — without anyone on their side who has read a wedding vendor contract before. Bindly provides that expertise on every contract that comes through the door, at a cost that makes professional review the obvious choice rather than the expensive one.
If a clause needs a paragraph of explanation, we write the paragraph. If it needs a rewrite, we draft the rewrite. No jargon dumped back on you.
Every flag points at a clause number, quotes the language, and ends with exactly what to ask for. You should never wonder what to do next.
We read for the couple, not the vendor. If something is unfair, we say so — even when the vendor is well-known.
We don’t represent you in court. We read contracts the way an experienced friend in the industry would — and we show our work. If you need litigation, hire a lawyer. If you need someone to read the paper before you sign it, that’s us.
