In 2023, my wife and I got married in Reunion Island.

150 guests, traditional ceremony, and over 20 000 euros spent.

The 18 months before the wedding, I'd planned the way most engineers do: a Google Sheet for the budget, a Notion page for the to-dos, a paper calendar for vendors. Three desynchronized tools and our two heads. We made several decisions twice because we couldn't find the first version, and a few decisions never landed at all — the kind you only notice when a vendor calls you on the morning of.

That's where ÆTHERNA came from. Not a startup idea, just a side project I've been working on evenings and weekends since 2025, alongside my day job in renewable energy. It centralizes the six things that drag in wedding planning: drag-and-drop seating plan, real-time budget, unified guest list and RSVP, 12-to-18-month timeline, day-of run-of-show, and head-table layout. Bilingual French and English. Fully collaborative: you can invite your fiancé, see what they changed and when, leave each other messages.

I also decided to create a planner mode, built on top of the couple mode. The idea: allow a wedding planner to take care of as many weddings as they would love to. Obviously they needed some specific features: billing schedule, multiwedding handling, etc.

The stack is Next.js App Router on Supabase and Clerk, deployed on Vercel. A few things I didn't expect: The first is how much you save by building from your own pain. I didn't have to interview users to know that the RSVP needs to handle "vegetarian, allergic to nuts, +1 confirmed yesterday" in the same row — we'd lived that exact case ourselves. Discovery went from months to weeks.

The second is what you have to refuse: gamification, making things stressfull, or building ÆTHERNA like the usual SaaS lookalike, which brings me to the third thing I didn't expect : design. I'd underestimated how much B2C wedding tech depends on whether the product feels like a wedding in the first three seconds. Most apps I tried felt either like Asana with a heart icon, or like a teenage countdown app. I went deep on Cormorant Garamond and a gold palette specifically because I wanted it to reflect the wedding I wish to each of us: something heavenly like.

Bilingual from day one was less about ambition than about cost: building English alongside French was maybe 5% more work, but it doubles the addressable market and let me start indexing in EN search engines from day one.

Live at aetherna.fr/en — free up to 50 guests, no credit card needed. I'd be curious to hear from anyone here who's built B2C consumer SaaS where users only stay 12-18 months by design. That's the part I haven't figured out yet.