We read the websites of 91 Westchester County wedding vendors in September 2026 and counted how many publish a price. Thirty seven do, which is the number our category hub pages carry. Only 19 of those 37 publish the figure on a page the business itself controls. The other 18 publish nothing of their own and carry a starting figure on a marketplace listing, on The Knot, WeddingWire or The Bash. The remaining 54 publish no number anywhere we could find. No package rate, no hourly rate, no per person minimum, no deposit amount. That is 54 of 91 running an inquiry only business, close to six in ten. The silence is not spread evenly. Photographers and videographers hold 14 of the 19 first party prices and 29 of the 37 figures of any kind. Across 13 caterers we found exactly one published figure, and it is tray pricing for drop off food rather than a staffed per person wedding rate. The four planners and florists publish nothing at all, first party or marketplace. This page does two things. It prints the count, category by category, and names every vendor who publishes a figure of its own, so you can check each one yourself. Then it covers the part that costs couples real money. What a marketplace starting price excludes. Why an hourly rate and a package rate cannot be compared until you translate one into the other. And the traps that surfaced again and again while we were reading. Every figure below is labelled first party or marketplace, and every marketplace is named.
Of the 91 vendor profiles we verified, 19 carry a dollar figure the business itself puts in public on pages it controls. 18 carry no first party figure but do have a starting price on a marketplace listing. 54 carry nothing at all.
Those first two groups add up to the 37 printed on each category hub. A hub counts one thing: whether the profile’s Starting price row holds a dollar figure, whoever published it. We use the same 91 records and the same rule, then split that 37 by who put the number out. A rate card on a vendor’s own site and a starting price typed into a marketplace field are different facts. Every count below is reconciled against the hub figure for its category.
Sixteen of the nineteen price the service you would hire them for. The other three price an accessory or a promotion. Westchester Entertainment publishes $250 for photo booth instant prints while its DJ packages stay quote only. Westchester Event Rentals publishes $40 to $80 string lights and $25 side wall panels, tents unpriced. Westchester Tent Rentals (LI Tent & Party Rentals) publishes a $50 off promotion and no base rate. All three are first party figures. None tells you what the wedding costs.
Silence is not a scandal. Plenty of vendors quote privately, because every wedding is a different job. The problem is what silence does to a budget. If 54 of 91 vendors will only give you a figure by email, your first quote arrives with nothing to sit beside it.
The split by category is sharp enough to change how you plan. Photography and video are the two categories where desk research works before you speak to anyone. Food, flowers, planning and live music are the categories where it does not.
Photographers run 30 profiles: 8 with a first party price, 9 with a marketplace figure only, 13 with nothing. That is the 17 of 30 the photographers hub prints. Videographers run 6, 6 and 6 across 18 profiles, which is the hub’s 12 of 18. Those two categories hold 14 of the 19 first party prices in the whole set.
Now the other end of the table. Across the 13 caterers and the 4 planners and florists there is one published first party price, and it belongs to a Bronx kitchen selling trays for drop off service. The 18 DJs and bands add one more, and it is a photo booth print rate. Catering is usually the largest line in the budget and the category where public pricing is thinnest.
| Category | Profiles | Publishes a figure anywhere (hub count) | First party, on their own site | Marketplace starting figure only | No price published anywhere |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Photographers | 30 | 17 | 8 | 9 | 13 |
| Videographers | 18 | 12 | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| DJs and bands | 18 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 14 |
| Caterers | 13 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 12 |
| Planners and florists | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Hair and makeup | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| Rentals and tents | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| All seven categories | 91 | 37 | 19 | 18 | 54 |
Every price below is first party, from the vendor’s own pages. The inclusions vary far more than the headline numbers do.
18 profiles have no price of their own but carry a starting figure on a marketplace: 10 on The Knot, 5 on WeddingWire, 3 on The Bash. Two of the ten also carry a WeddingWire figure, and we count each profile once. They tell you roughly where a vendor sits in the market. As a budget input they are close to useless.
A starting figure is a floor, and the floor is often a package nobody books. The vendor types it in and is under no obligation to refresh it, so a number can sit unchanged after the real price has moved. And it almost never states the hours of coverage, which is what the price is mostly made of.
The set gives two clean demonstrations. George Street Photo & Video shows $1,695 starting on The Knot and $1,395 on WeddingWire for the same region, two figures for one company, $300 apart. JDE Events (Jimmy Dee Entertainment) shows a $1,599 starting price on The Knot alongside a typical spend of $2,399 on that same listing, a gap of $800. Neither company publishes a rate on its own site.
One more matters if you shortlist on price. EP Event Group carries a $500 starting figure on WeddingWire for video. Photo and video there is one division of an entertainment company, so $500 may be a rate bundled with a DJ booking. A written quote would tell you. A marketplace field cannot.
Two vendors price by the hour, and both figures come from The Bash. Atepa Media lists $175 per hour for all inclusive photo and video. Wed Film Co lists $800 per event starting. Beside Poppy Studio at $3,900 first party, the hourly vendors look cheap. That is not a comparison yet.
Translate before you react. The published packages in this set run from six hours of coverage to twelve. At $175 an hour, eight hours is $1,400 and twelve is $2,100, before any edit, album, second shooter or travel line lands. A package has the opposite shape. It fixes a block of hours and charges overtime past it.
So compare cost per hour of coverage, with the deliverables held constant. Jaime Glez Photography buys eight hours with two photographers for $4,000. Poppy Studio buys six hours for $3,900, second shooter on top. They sit much further apart than their headline figures suggest.
46 of the 91 profiles do not publish their hours of coverage at all. Ask for the hours before anything else. Without that number, no two quotes here can be lined up.
This was the most persistent pattern in the research, and most websites do not surface it. 30 of the 91 vendors we verified operate from a base outside Westchester County while marketing into it. Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Garden City, Beacon, Rhinebeck, Wappingers Falls, Washingtonville, four Connecticut towns, Boston and Seattle all appear as home bases.
21 of those 30 are photographers or videographers. An out of county base is not a warning by itself. Hudson River Photographer works from Rhinebeck, publishes $7,000 starting as a first party figure, and states plainly that Westchester travel is quoted separately.
The cases to watch are the ones where the base is hard to pin down. Three profiles carry a home town that conflicts between sources. Michael Ursone Films lists Stamford, Connecticut on its own site and Croton-on-Hudson on The Knot. ValCinema Weddings names Georgia while WeddingWire lists Mount Vernon. JCP Images appears as Irvington on WeddingWire and Ossining on The Knot. A base you cannot locate is a travel fee you cannot estimate.
Two more worth naming. Groove Authority is a Boston band with a Westchester landing page and no published rates. Abigail Kirsch Off-Premise Catering is headquartered in Manhattan, and every venue on its off premise page is a New York City venue.
We logged what each profile fails to publish. Travel fees came up 55 times across 91 profiles, which makes the travel charge the most commonly withheld figure in the set. It beats the hours of coverage and the deposit amount.
It clusters where the drives are longest. 16 of 18 DJ and band profiles publish no travel or parking charge. All 4 hair and makeup profiles leave it out, which matters more than it sounds. Hair and makeup has to reach you at the getting ready location, early, sometimes at two separate addresses.
Westchester is not one drive. A vendor in Rye working a wedding in North Salem is a real trip, and a vendor in Stamford or Beacon is a longer one. None of it appears on a homepage. All of it appears on an invoice.
Ask two questions in writing. What is the travel charge to this exact venue address, in dollars. Does it cover every person on the crew, or is it charged per vehicle.
10 of 48 photography and videography profiles do not publish what a second shooter costs. 21 profiles across the set do not publish an overtime rate. Both surface late in a booking, after you have decided you want this vendor, which is the worst moment to learn a number.
Poppy Studio is the useful example, because it publishes enough to make the trap visible. $3,900 buys six hours, which is short for a Westchester wedding running from getting ready photographs to a late reception. Second shooter and overtime are charged on top, and neither carries a price. The honest reading of that $3,900 is $3,900 plus two figures you do not have yet.
Overtime is concentrated in music. Eleven of the 15 DJ profiles in that group of 18 publish no overtime rate. A DJ is the vendor most likely to be asked for another 45 minutes at eleven at night, when nobody is in a negotiating mood.
Get the overtime rate before you sign, in dollars per hour, and get it into the contract.
All 4 rental companies in the set withhold delivery and installation charges, and all four leave the tent package price unquoted. Party Line Rentals runs a size calculator that returns a tent dimension and no price. Westchester Event Rentals lists 40, 60 and 80 guest packages with no figures attached.
A tent quote hides its cost in the same three places every time: the delivery and installation charge, the flooring, and the heating or cooling. Add the damage waiver and the deposit and you have five lines that never appear in public.
The delivery and pickup window is the operational trap rather than the financial one. Venues here commonly allow a limited load in time and require a strike by a set hour next morning. A company that cannot meet that window either charges a premium or pushes you into a second day of venue hire. Get the install date, the strike date and the arrival window in writing.
One structural note. Westchester Tent Rentals (LI Tent & Party Rentals) operates from a Buchanan branch of LI Tent and Party Rentals, headquartered in Bay Shore on Long Island. Ask which warehouse your order ships from, because the two may carry different delivery charges.
All of the above reduces to one habit. Do not compare headline figures. Compare written scopes, and insist on the same fields from every vendor.
Of the 91 verified vendor profiles on this site, 19 publish a first party dollar figure on pages they control. 18 publish nothing first party but carry a starting price on a marketplace listing, on The Knot, WeddingWire or The Bash. Add those two groups and you get the 37 of 91 our category hubs report. The remaining 54 publish no figure anywhere we looked. Three of the 19 first party publishers price only an add on or a promotion, so 16 publish a price for the service itself.
Treat it as a position in the market and nothing more. It is a floor, it is entered by the vendor rather than audited, it rarely states the hours of coverage, and it can sit unchanged for a long time. Two cases in our set show the problem. George Street Photo and Video shows $1,695 on The Knot and $1,395 on WeddingWire for the same region. JDE Events shows a $1,599 starting price on The Knot alongside a typical spend of $2,399 on the same listing.
Catering, which is usually also the biggest line. Across 13 caterer profiles there is one published first party figure, and it is tray pricing for drop off food from a Bronx kitchen rather than a staffed per person wedding rate. The four planners and florists publish nothing at all, on their own sites or on any marketplace. Across the 18 DJs and bands, four figures exist and only one of them is first party. Photography and video are the two categories where desk research works, holding 14 of the 19 first party prices.
Not automatically, but you have to ask, because 30 of the 91 vendors we verified are based outside the county and travel in. Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Long Island, Dutchess and Orange counties, several Connecticut towns, Boston and Seattle all turn up as home bases. Travel fees are the most commonly withheld figure in the whole set, missing from 55 of 91 profiles. Get the charge to your exact venue address, in dollars, before you shortlist anyone.
They are different products until you translate one into the other. Published packages in this set run from six hours of coverage to twelve, so at $175 an hour you are looking at $1,400 for eight hours and $2,100 for twelve, before editing, albums, a second shooter or travel. A package fixes a block of hours and charges overtime past it. Convert both to a cost per hour of coverage, with the deliverables held constant, and then compare.
An itemised quote with delivery, installation, pickup and strike on their own lines, plus the install date, the strike date and the arrival window in writing. All 4 rental companies in our set leave delivery and installation charges unpublished, and none publishes a tent package price. Also ask who files any town tent permit, who pays for it, and which warehouse the order ships from.
We read the public websites of 91 Westchester County wedding vendors, plus their listings on The Knot, WeddingWire and The Bash where those exist, in September 2026. Every count on this page is computed directly from those 91 records, in the seven categories this site groups them into. The category hubs count a vendor as publishing a figure when its Starting price row holds a dollar amount, and 37 of the 91 meet that test. This page reports the same 37 and then splits it, 19 first party and 18 marketplace only. A figure is labelled first party when it appears on a page the business controls, and marketplace when the only source we could find is a platform listing, with the platform named each time. We did not estimate, round or infer any price. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so and say where we looked. Where two sources disagree, on a price or on a home town, we print both and name each. Two limits are worth stating. We read public pages, so a rate sitting behind an inquiry form is not captured, and some vendors send a full rate card within an hour of a first email. And 20 profiles give no specific town, only a county, a region such as the Hudson Valley, or nothing at all, which makes a travel estimate impossible from the outside. Prices change and marketplace listings go stale, so confirm any figure here against a current written quote before you rely on it.