Tape bar??

Cash bar is going to help by providing first 2 tickets to all guests and then they wouldn't mind paying. Its a good compromise as you said.

We are supplying our alcohol to the venue and paying no more than 1,000$ including the service fee at our venue. That way we can get discounts buying in bulk at the saq

We did this as well. open bar at cocktail hour with a limit of $1000 (they came to talk to us when that limit was reached to see if we wanted to raise the limit or switch to cash) we then switched to cash bar - it reached the limit very fast.
We had wine on the tables for dinner... and then the rest of the night was cash bar.
We had drink tickets for bridal party & family

Most of the weddings I've been to have been cash bar. I like the idea of 1-2 drink tickets, and then guests pay for any other drinks they want. We are doing corkage at our wedding: buying our own alcohol and venue charges a per person cost to serve it. Once it runs out, it's out. I don't drink alot and don't want a bunch of tipsy + people at my wedding--I deal with that at my job enough!

That sounds perfectly acceptable and a good compromise. I’m sure people will be fine with it.

I also im on a budget... ($8500 ish) but we have decided to do a backyard wedding and that way we can supply our own booze. So we have bought our favorite wines on really good sales over the last year and have bottled a bunch of homebrew wine. And we will be getting a couple kegs of our favorite craft beers. So we will have open bar (beer and wines only) and it wont cost us more than $1500 for a 150 person wedding. AND any wine that doesnt get drank i can keep. So its a win-win

We had an open bar but only had 32 people and several of them didn't drink. There is nothing wrong with offering a couple of complimentary drinks and then your guests pay if they would like more. At my daughter's wedding, there were 3 drink tickets per guest, after which you'd buy your own. The only strange thing is that many of the drink tickets were stolen by some greedy lushes at the wedding. Not sure how to solve that problem. Maybe only have 2 drink tickets per person and they would be used up before any slippery fingers can get them.

We had a small budget as well, 8-10k. We couldn't afford open bar either so we did drink tickets. I think everyone ended up getting 3-4 drink tickets and then it was cash bar. But everyone got a glass of champagne after the ceremony and 2 glasses of wine included with dinner as that's what our venue provides. We gave a couple extra tickets to out bridal party (only 4 people). Everyone seemed happy with that and everyone still had an awesome time and pretty much everyone got drunk lol so they still had fun.

I hink you can do whatever you like. No one will be offended. Most people carry cash at weddings for the bar even if just to tip. We had friends who paid for a certain amount at the bar for their wedding and then we were left to pay for our own drinks and no one minded at all.