Four steps, one afternoon, and you can stop after the third without paying anything. Below is the whole process honestly — including how long each part really takes and what tends to go wrong.
On iPhone: open the chat, tap the contact or group name at the top, scroll to the bottom, and choose Export Chat → Attach Media. On Android: ⋮ → More → Export chat → Include media. You get a .zip.
Choose with media. Without it, every photograph in your book becomes the words “image omitted”. The trade is that WhatsApp caps a media export at 10,000 messages against 40,000 without — which matters on a long chat, and has its own guide.
Step-by-step: on iPhone · on Android · a group chat · the button is missing
You do not need to unzip it. Drag the file in whole and the studio reads it — every message, in order, with the photos, stickers, video stills and voice notes put back where they belong. Group chats keep each person’s WhatsApp colour and their profile photo.
Then you choose: page size, light or dark pages, the names on the cover, and a date range if you only want one year rather than seven. It tells you your exact page count immediately, which is also what decides the price.
This is the part that matters and the part most services do not offer. Not a sample spread — all three hundred pages, with a faint mark across each one. Nothing is blurred, nothing is paywalled, and there is no trial clock.
Read it before you spend anything, because a WhatsApp export is not always what you expect. It may have been trimmed at the old end, or missing photos the phone had already offloaded. Better to find that out now, for nothing, than after it is printed.
If the free book is enough, stop here — it is yours to keep and re-read forever. If you want it in someone’s hands, buy the print-ready files: exact A4, A5, A6 or 21 cm square pages and a wraparound cover with the spine measured to your page count.
Take that to any print shop and most will bind it the same day — usually cheaper than international shipping alone, and you can print it again in ten years. The spec to read out to them. Copies printed and posted by us are coming soon — or commission the hand-bound Heirloom, which is open now.
An afternoon, most of which is waiting for WhatsApp to zip your media. The export is a few minutes of tapping, the studio reads it in seconds, and reading your own book is the part you will want to take time over. Printing is the only step measured in days.
You sign in to build a book, so that your work survives closing the tab and so a paid book stays attached to you rather than to a device. You do not need a card, and the free book has no time limit.
No. The book is typeset by software and printed by a machine, and nobody here opens it. The finished pages are deleted as soon as your book reaches you, and within 48 hours in every case if something fails partway. The single exception is the hand-bound Heirloom edition, which one person proofreads because it prints only once and a mistake could never be corrected.
Past roughly 350 pages it is split into a matching numbered set of volumes, so each one opens flat instead of cracking at the spine. Each volume is priced as its own book and you can start with the first.
No. Only a participant can export a conversation, which is deliberate and is why nobody can buy a book of your messages. The usual route for a surprise is to conspire with one person who is in the chat.
More detail on any step is in the guides — or see what a book costs and the three editions.