The quote writes itself as you answer, so nothing's hidden

When a couple's planning a wedding, there are two things they want to know about a supplier before anything else. Is my date free, and roughly what's this going to cost? Hardly anyone in the industry answers either of them. You fill in a form, you wait, and then a brochure turns up with a "starts at" price.

Tiff's whole pitch is that she doesn't do that. So her site couldn't do it either, and the booking funnel is the place where that promise either holds up or falls over.

The whole funnel is built around a ledger. It's a dark panel down the right-hand side, and every time you answer a question it picks up a new line. The questions change on the left and the ledger stays put.

So by the time a couple gets to the last step, they've watched their own price being written. The estimate isn't a number that appears at the end. It's what they've been reading the whole way down. Tiff's promise is that nothing's hidden, and this is how the page keeps it.

Travel is the number couples brace themselves for, so it's the one the funnel has to get right. I tried straight-line distance first, because all it needs is two sets of coordinates. It came in twenty to thirty-five per cent under the real road distance, which meant £13 where her price list says £35, and £46 where it says £75.

Quoting low and then correcting upwards on the call is exactly what her testimonials praise her for never doing. So the funnel works out a real driving distance from the venue's postcode instead. That got within about £3 of her published figures.

I built the endpoint to read a secret iCal address from Tiff's Google Calendar. But her calendar is on Google Workspace, and Workspace only lets you share free and busy outside the organisation, which hides the one setting my whole design depended on. Her admin console didn't offer a switch to turn it back on.

So in the end the feed became a small script running inside her own account, publishing the same format. Once I could see her real diary, it turned out to be simple. That calendar's only for her bookings, and every wedding goes in as an all-day event. Google leaves all-day events marked as free, so the checker ignores that and blocks the date like it should.

Eight days after launch, Tiff was using the travel step herself. She typed in a postcode, pressed See your price, and nothing happened. There was a little Check button next to the field that you had to press first, and nothing on the page told you that.

That was my mistake, not hers. The field looks finished the moment the postcode is in, so anyone would've missed it. We fixed it by getting rid of the Check button altogether. Now a full postcode looks itself up as soon as you've typed it, and See your price is never disabled. If you press it early, it finishes the lookup and carries on. If there's nothing it can use, it tells you why.

The second fix was one I couldn't see from my desk. The site moved from Vercel to Cloudflare at launch. Vercel had been holding on to the calendar's answer for fifteen minutes at a time. Cloudflare doesn't cache a function's response, so every single visit was reading Tiff's calendar live, and that read can take longer than the function is willing to wait. When I measured it on 14 September, four reads out of eight failed. Couples were being told to email when the diary was fine.

Now the function keeps the last good answer and serves it for five minutes, then reads the calendar again behind the next visitor. A slow or failed read never replaces a good one.

While I was digging into it, I also found a bug of my own. The page started out with an empty list of booked dates, so if you checked a date while the calendar was still loading, it could come back as free. Now it waits for the calendar before it answers.

It went live on 6 September 2026. I don't have conversion numbers yet, and I'm not going to make any up.

What I'd watch is how many couples drop off between the date step and the estimate, how many get to a price and then book a call, and how the enquiries Tiff gets start to change. My bet is that fewer people email just to ask what things cost, and the ones who do email already know.