Wedding contracts are signed in the happiest possible mood about the least happy possible clauses — what happens if someone cancels, postpones, no-shows, or sends a substitute. And the money is structured backwards from consumer intuition: deposits are usually retainers (often non-refundable by design — the vendor turned away other bookings for your date), while the cancellation timeline decides whether a change of plans costs 20% or 100%. This skill decodes the clauses that bite, computes the walk-away cost at each date, and lists what vendors routinely amend when asked before signing.
What This Skill Produces
- A clause-by-clause decode with 🔴🟡🟢 severity, wedding-specific
- The cancellation-cost timeline — what backing out costs at each milestone date, computed from the contract's own schedule
- The questions for this vendor — targeted at the contract's silences
- What's actually negotiable — the amendments vendors commonly accept pre-signature
Required Inputs
Ask for these only if they aren't already provided:
- The contract text — pasted or transcribed; decode what's there and name the missing standard clauses (a contract's silences are findings — no postponement clause is itself the postponement policy)
- The vendor type and the money — total, deposit, payment schedule; vendor types have different signature risks (venue: minimums and vendor-lockins · photographer: substitute and delivery terms · caterer: per-head true-up dates · band/DJ: overtime and substitute)
- The couple's realistic risks — deployment-prone job? Health situations? A date that might move? The decode weights what's likely for them
Framework: Severity Scale
- 🔴 Can cost you real money — cancellation schedules that jump to 100% early (quote the dates, compute the timeline), postponement treated as cancellation (the clause that hurt everyone in living memory — date-change terms deserve their own paragraph and often don't have one), guest-count minimums with full-price true-ups, "substitute performer/photographer at our discretion" with no approval or refund rights, overtime rates unstated or extreme, force-majeure that excuses only the vendor, auto-forfeiture of everything paid regardless of timing or resale of the date.
- 🟡 Unusual — clarify before signing — delivery timelines for photos/video absent ("sneak peek in 2 weeks, gallery by [date]" belongs in writing), exclusive-vendor requirements and their corkage/cake-cutting fee schedule, meal/break riders, image-rights clauses (who can publish the photos where), setup/teardown windows that don't match the venue's.
- 🟢 Standard — retainer non-refundability itself (industry-normal — the schedule is the fight, not the retainer), service-charge line items disclosed up front, standard liability language; label them so the couple fights the right battles.
Always compute the walk-away table: for each contract milestone date, the cost of cancelling that day (deposit + scheduled payments + any penalty), and the same for a date change if the contract distinguishes — because "what does changing the date cost in March?" is the question the contract was designed not to answer plainly.
Output Format
Vendor Contract Decode: [vendor type — total]
1. The verdict — sign / amend these clauses first / keep shopping, in two sentences.
2. Clause decode
| Clause (§) | What it says | What it means for your wedding | Severity |
|---|
3. 💸 The walk-away table — per milestone date: cancellation cost · date-change cost (or "contract is silent — that's question #1").
4. Questions for the vendor — 4–6, aimed at the silences: postponement terms, substitute policy, overtime rate in writing, delivery dates, what happens if they cancel.
5. What's negotiable — date-change addendum (the most-granted ask in the industry), delivery deadlines, overtime caps, substitute-approval rights, payment-schedule shifts.
End the artifact with, verbatim: "This is a plain-language reading, not legal/financial advice — laws vary by jurisdiction; confirm anything load-bearing with a qualified professional."
Quality Checks
- The walk-away table is computed from the contract's actual schedule, per date
- Postponement-vs-cancellation treatment is explicitly determined or flagged as silent
- Missing standard clauses are named as findings, not skipped
- Retainer non-refundability is decoded as normal while the schedule gets the scrutiny
- The disclaimer line appears verbatim in the artifact
Anti-Patterns
- Do not fight the retainer's existence — industry-standard; the escalation schedule is where money moves
- Do not assume postponement ≠ cancellation — unless the contract says so, it doesn't
- Do not invent clauses that aren't in the document — silences get questions, not assumptions
- Do not skip the vendor-cancels-you direction — their force majeure needs a your-money answer
- Do not present jurisdiction-dependent consumer protections as universal — flag and refer out
Based On
Client-side event-contract review — cancellation-schedule math, postponement-clause triage, silence auditing.
Example Trigger Phrases
- "Review this venue contract."
- "Is this photographer contract normal?"
- "What if we have to postpone?"
- "Decode this caterer agreement."