Unfortunately you need an iPhone to create the invite, or contribute anything else than a reply. They have to know their uncoolness is tolerated but not welcomed in the walled garden.
I just spent $70 to send out birthday party invites to 40 parents on Evite. The free version sends an invite with ads, links to Amazon, and other tacky stuff. As an iPhone user with two kids switching to iCloud+ is cheaper than the alternatives. And I think many other parents will agree.
The competition I see for this is partiful (https://partiful.com/), which is free, handles invites for folks without accounts (I don't have one, I am invited to parties via text message), and is clearly the inspiration/competition apples for this app given the visual similarities.
Simple: I’ve never heard of it until this thread. I get probably 20 birthday party invites a year from Silicon Valley-type families, and they are all using Evite or Paperless Post. There was a time when I would have looked for alternatives or rolled my own solution, but living busy toddler life means I pick my battles and grumble about it on Hacker News :)
I think they both used to be cheaper, but now they’re focused on profits. Same as Partiful will do eventually.
Amusingly, I've never heard of either of those. Partiful is much more oriented towards less "professional" parties, it's replacing what was the facebook event segment of a lot of my social circle event organizing.
I'd be pretty peeved to spend any money on such a service, and many of my friends simply couldn't.
There are lots of ways to buy things from walmart without $25,000.
But to consider this more realistically: yes, one of the reasons I don't shop at walmart is because I don't own a car, and the closes Walmart to me is over 2 hours away on public transit, whereas the closest target is 15 minutes away, and amazon doesn't require me to leave my house.
Walmart is fine with that because me not shopping there doesn't make the store less attractive to others, but with social media it does. Me not using the iphone-only social media because it is behind a $500 or $1000 paywall makes it less useful for other people, especially when there are free alternatives around.
