I got married about 4 months ago, so I just dealt with all of this recently. We had around 250 guests at our wedding and I am pretty sure the cost was kept around 20k and was completely paid for by my wife's family. It was a decent meal but no booze:(
We got a lot of stuff off our registry which was sort of nice, but a lot of the stuff we registered for is not very useful. We also got a lot of gift cards which we are still trying to spend. I liked getting cash/checks and it has been very useful.