Don’t want to spend $30,000+ on a wedding? These Philly micro-wedding venues offer packages for $1,000 or less

Angela Gaspar spent about $2,000 to get married last weekend.

The Philadelphia wedding photographer opted to forgo the extravagance that accompanies so many modern nuptials — and this year will cost U.S. couples $33,000 on average, according to the wedding planning site Zola.

In front of a handful of friends, Gaspar and her now husband, Avi Rubinsky, tied the knot at Philly Elopement Co., their new Kensington micro-wedding venue, which maxes out at 16 guests.

Even brainstorming for a smaller but more traditional wedding, “I just started getting overwhelmed,” said Gaspar, 46, of Fishtown. “The cost, the planning, thinking of having all that attention on me.”

The couple briefly considered getting married in Las Vegas, Gaspar said. “But then we were like, ‘Why isn’t there something like this here, but cooler?’”

So they found a loft space and opened their own micro-wedding venue. Their yearlong lease started July 1, and the website went live last week. On Saturday, they became the first couple to get married there. They plan to spend the money they saved on a honeymoon to Iceland.

Philly Elopement Co. is the latest Philadelphia venue to cater exclusively to so-called micro-weddings, or nuptials with fewer than 50 people in attendance. These ceremonies typically aren’t followed by traditional receptions, saving couples money (the venue fee alone can be $12,000 or more for larger weddings), as well as the stress that so often accompanies the wedding planning process.

» READ MORE: More Philly couples are hiring wedding content creators, so they and their guests can ‘live in the moment’

Micro-weddings remain in the minority, with 13% of couples who got married last year inviting 50 or fewer people, according to a recent survey from wedding planning site the Knot.

But couples are inviting almost 40 fewer people on average than couples did at the height of the big-wedding boom in 2007, the Knot found. And there are indications that some couples are trimming their guest lists more drastically, for financial or personal reasons, as costs keep rising.

Over the past decade, the local micro-wedding industry has expanded, keeping pace with the small but growing national trend of “downsizing your wedding,” as the Knot describes it.

Stacey Thomas, owner of the Philadelphia Wedding Chapel, has seen rising demand for elopements and micro-weddings at her East Falls venue. Inside the Sherman Mills complex, her loft space offers six packages that range from the $125 “Make It Legal” — a quick paperwork signing with the couple and an officiant — to the $795 “Something Special” ceremony with up to 30 guests.

In 2013, the venue’s first year in business, it hosted about 100 weddings, Thomas said. More recently, it has done 600 to 800 weddings a year on average.

The demographics of the couples have also changed, she said.

Ten years ago, “it was older couples. It was couples who had been married before. Maybe couples who had been together for a while, couples with children,” Thomas said. Over the past few years, “younger people are also choosing to do this. I don’t mean shotgun weddings. I mean kids [in their 20s and 30s] who are like ‘We don’t want to spend $40,000 on a wedding. We just bought a house, or we want to buy a house, or we’re going on vacation.’”

In 2018, another Philadelphia micro-wedding venue, Vaux Studio, opened in Center City, The venue, which maxes out at 25 guests, describes itself as “elegantly intimate” and “truly bespoke.” The 12th and Spruce Street space has expanded over the years to offer more services, including a getting-ready suite. Prices are not listed on its website, and Vaux did not return request for comment.

Some restaurants and larger wedding venues in the city and suburbs also offer packages for smaller celebrations.

In Kensington, the new Philly Elopement Co. charges $800 for a half-hour Wednesday elopement and $1,500 for an hour-and-a-half micro-wedding on the weekend. Both options come with photography by Gaspar, and the weekend package also includes officiating and coordinating by Rubinsky.

No couples had booked as of Tuesday, Gaspar said, but several had inquired about having their wedding there. She is hopeful about the venue’s future given the trends she, too, has noticed in recent years as a wedding photographer.

Since the pandemic, she said she’s seen an uptick in the number of couples foregoing the big, expensive party.

“They were seeing how nice it was to have these small intimate weddings,” she said, “and not take out loans for a wedding.”

It also allows couples to focus less on superficial details of the day, Thomas said, and more on the commitment they’re making to each other for life.

In her previous job as a wedding planner, she planned ornate affairs, sometimes with six-figure price tags. She said she often wanted to ask the couples: “Do you want to be married, or do you want a wedding?”

With the more than 5,000 couples who have gotten married at the Philadelphia Wedding Chapel, she said she hasn’t had to wonder.

While there are a myriad of ways to have a minimalistic wedding, here is roughly how Angela Gaspar’s $2,070 wedding-day budget broke down:

Being a wedding photographer and owning the new micro-wedding venue, Philly Elopement Co., Gaspar didn’t have to pay for photography — which can be $3,000 or more — or a venue, which is often the largest wedding expense.

For an elopement or micro-wedding, however, some Philadelphia venues offer packages for less than $1,000. By choosing one of those options, foregoing a professional photographer, and making other choices similar to Gaspar’s, you could keep your wedding costs around $3,000. It costs: