Someone FINALLY Made a Search Engine for Wedding Venues

Here’s how the wedding planning process currently goes if you want to get married anywhere other than your own backyard: You make a long list of venues found in magazines or via the Knot or through Google, then you start emailing.

You email, and you email, then you email a little bit more. Sometimes you’ll have to pick up the phone or, worst of all, actually go somewhere in person to get something as basic as pricing information. It’s time-consuming and it sucks spending your evenings neck-deep in spreadsheets.

But at last, a ray of light! Fast Company reports that a bunch of programmers in Brooklyn have created The Hitch, a search engine for wedding venues with—miracle of miracles!—price estimates. And not just some useless “$ to $$$$” system, either. Also included: big pics and info like whether there’s room for a band.

Fucking finally.

The downside is that when you see how much weddings in your area generally cost, you will probably barf into the nearest handbag. And remember, this doesn’t include crap like invitations and flowers. (Don’t even get me started on the highway robbery that is floral arrangements — it’ll make you want to buy a bunch of ferns at Lowe’s, plop ’em on the table and call it a centerpiece.)

Unfortunately, the site in its current form is far, far from being a end-all, be-all resource. So far they’ve only got 105 venues signed up, and those are spread across 30 states. Hopefully a little ramped-up marketing will encourage folks to actually sign up, but it’s too soon to print off and symbolically burn your meticulously crafted spreadsheets.