Zapptales alternatives, compared honestly
There are four serious alternatives and one free one. Which is right depends almost entirely on why you are looking: price, a chat app zapptales does not cover, discomfort with voice notes becoming QR codes, or the shipping bill to somewhere outside Europe. We make one of these alternatives, and we will tell you plainly where it loses.
First: why are you looking?
zapptales is the biggest service in this category by a distance — a German company that has printed for more than a quarter of a million people. Most people who go looking for an alternative are not unhappy with the books. They are looking for one of five specific things, and the right alternative is different for each.
“The shipping to me is absurd”
A bound book posted from Europe to South Africa, Nigeria, India or the Philippines can cost more in freight than the book. The fix is not a different printer — it is buying the print-ready file and having a shop near you bind it. See printing locally.
“I don't want my voice notes to be QR codes”
zapptales prints voice messages and videos as scannable codes, sold as an add-on with ten years of hosting. If a code that stops working in 2036 is not what you pictured, this is the page for you.
“My chat isn't WhatsApp”
Then stay with zapptales, or use My Forever Books. Both handle iMessage, Messenger, Telegram and Instagram. Kept in Print reads WhatsApp exports and nothing else — if your conversation lives elsewhere, we cannot help you and will not pretend to.
“I want to see it before I pay”
This is the biggest structural difference in the category. Most services show you a preview and take payment to unlock the book. Kept in Print gives you the whole book, every page, free, with a faint mark across it.
“I want something more than a printed book”
Nobody in this category makes a hand-bound edition of one. That is the Heirloom — sewn and cased by hand, commissioned rather than ordered, with a numbered wax-sealed certificate and every file destroyed afterwards.
The alternatives, side by side
| zapptales | My Forever Books | Kept in Print | Do it yourself | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chat apps | WhatsApp, iMessage, Messenger, Telegram, Threema, Instagram | Nine, incl. Discord, GroupMe, KakaoTalk | WhatsApp only | Whatever you can export |
| Voice notes on the page | QR code (paid add-on, 10-year hosting) | QR code (included) | Printed waveform + real duration | A line of text |
| See the whole book before paying | Preview | No free version | Yes — every page, free | n/a |
| Buy just the file | PDF included with a book order | PDF backup included | Yes — the file is the product | Free |
| Printed and posted | Yes, established | Yes, 221 countries | See availability below | You take it to a shop |
| Published price | From €32.90 softcover / €35.90 hardcover, first 100 pages | $59 paperback / $109 hardcover | Calculator | Paper and binding only |
| Track record | 250,000+ customers | Established, US | One person, Durban | Yours |
Competitor figures were read from their own published pages on 9 August 2026 and are quoted for comparison, not as a live quote — zapptales pricing and My Forever Books. Prices change; check theirs before you decide. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
The free alternative nobody advertises
You can export the chat, open the .txt, and print it. It costs nothing, uploads nothing, and takes about two minutes — the steps are here. The result is a timestamped transcript with no bubbles and no photographs, which is perfect for an archive and wrong for a gift. Anyone in this category who does not tell you this option exists is hoping you will not find out.
Where zapptales is genuinely the better buy
- Your chat is not WhatsApp. Six platforms against one. This is not close.
- You are in Europe and want a parcel. Domestic shipping, an established fulfilment operation, and years of doing it.
- You want the safety of scale. A quarter of a million customers is a real answer to “what if something goes wrong”. Kept in Print is one person who answers his own contact form. Some people want the person; some want the company. Both are reasonable.
- You want the videos accessible. A QR code can play a video. Ink cannot. If moving pictures matter more than permanence, the code is the right technology.
- You are still shopping. This page is one comparison; the wider list of alternatives to zapptales includes services we do not compete with at all, and the free route that needs no service.
So which should you pick?
If your conversation is not on WhatsApp, stop here and use zapptales — nothing else on this page will serve you. If it is on WhatsApp and you are outside Europe, the cheapest good outcome is almost always buy the file, bind it locally, whoever you buy the file from. If the voice notes are the reason you are making this at all — a parent, a partner, someone who has died — then how each service treats them should decide it for you, and it is the one place we would argue hardest for our own answer.
Questions people actually ask
Is there a free alternative to zapptales?
For a real bound book, no — someone has to print it. For getting your chat out and readable, yes: export it and print the transcript yourself for nothing, or build the whole book on Kept in Print free and read every page before deciding whether to buy the print-ready file.
Which service is cheapest?
It depends on your page count and where you live, and shipping usually decides it rather than the book. Outside Europe and North America the cheapest route to a bound book is normally to buy a print-ready file and have a local shop bind it, which skips international courier entirely.
Does any service print voice notes without a QR code?
Kept in Print prints the waveform and the real duration onto the page as ink. zapptales and My Forever Books both use scannable codes that link to hosted audio. Neither approach is wrong — one is permanent, the other plays.
Can I get a chat book if my chat is on iMessage or Telegram?
Yes, but not from Kept in Print, which reads WhatsApp exports only. zapptales covers six platforms and My Forever Books covers nine.
Do these services read my conversation?
Policies differ and you should read each one. Kept in Print's answer: the book is typeset by software and nobody opens it, files are deleted within 48 hours, and the single exception is the hand-bound Heirloom edition, which is proofread by one person because it prints only once and a mistake could never be corrected.
Read your whole book before you choose.
Build it — freeThis is one of the comparisons — or see everything we’ve written.