Simple pricing

Pay per book, not per month. Gifts shouldn’t have subscriptions.

See all three editions side by side → Work out a printed book’s exact cost →

Read it

Freethe whole book — a copy to read

Find out tonight whether your chat is the book you think it is.

  • Read all of it — every page, before you decide anything
  • Their face, your wallpaper, the voice notes — nothing stripped out
  • One A5 PDF, yours to keep and re-read forever. No card, no trial clock.
  • A faint mark across each page, and a line pointing home
  • Made to be read, not to be bound — print it and you get paper, not a book
Read ours — free
What people actually give

Print-ready files

R349one-time, per book · ≈ $19 USD

Not permission to print your book. The four files that make one possible.

  • A wraparound cover — back, spine and front on one sheet, the spine measured to your page count
  • The inside pages with bleed, and the margin shifted page by page so nothing falls into the binding
  • A second copy laid out two-to-a-sheet, to print and cut on your own printer tonight
  • A note in the box for the print shop. You walk in and explain nothing.
  • A long chat arrives as matching volumes, each with its own cover and spine
Make the one that lasts

What actually lands in your downloads folder

One zip. Open it and this is what is inside — a folder to hand to a print shop, and a folder for the printer in your spare room.

  • START HERE — what is in this kit.txttwo paragraphs, no jargon
  • Take this to a print shop/
  • cover — wraparound.pdfback, spine and front on one wide sheet · bleed already included
  • inside pages.pdfcover and back cover removed, the binding margin shifted page by page
  • read me — for the print shop.txtpaper, finished size, spine width, print at 100%
  • Print it at home/
  • print THIS first — which way does your printer flip.pdffour sheets that tell you which file below is yours
  • two pages per sheet — flip on SHORT edge.pdfdouble-sided, already in cut-and-stack order
  • two pages per sheet — flip on LONG edge.pdfthe same book, arranged for the other kind of printer
  • read me — printing at home.txtwhich way to flip, where to cut, how to stack

A chat too long to bind as one book arrives with a volume 1, volume 2 and so on — each with its own cover, and its own spine measured to its own page count. The free PDF has none of these files. It is one A5 document, from the first page to the last.

Give a book

Only someone in the chat can make the book — but anyone can give the means. A prepaid voucher, as a gold card: “One book, on me.”

Coming soon

R349 for a file?”

Fair question, and the answer is that it is not one file — it is the set above, and a note telling a printer what to do with them. Here is what people ask before they decide, and where it is cheaper to go elsewhere.

Can't I just print the free one?

You can, and nobody will stop you. Office A4, black and white or colour, any copy shop on the corner — it costs very little and it reads perfectly well. What comes back is a stack of paper. Our mark sits on every page, the cover is bound inside the book as page one, every trimmed edge shows a white sliver where the design was meant to run off, and the inside margin is identical on both sides of the sheet, so half your words end up in the glue. Right words, wrong object. Print it if you like — then look at what the kit prints.

And if I take the mark off?

You would still be holding the wrong file. The mark is the smallest of four differences: no wraparound cover, so there is no spine and nothing to letter down it; no bleed, so the white edges stay; no shifted margin, so the text goes into the binding; and one file however long the chat is, when anything past about 500 pages has to be bound as two. Worth knowing too: the mark is not sitting in your copy waiting to be edited out — it is laid on by our own printer at the moment the file is made, and the tools that promise to strip one usually flatten every page to a picture on the way through, which is precisely what a print shop cannot use. The money is not a fee to remove a watermark.

Why wait for the post at all?

With the files you don't. Download them the moment the book is finished, walk into any print shop, and hand it over tonight if you want to — most bind same-day. No two-week courier window, no customs desk, no tracking number to refresh. Anniversary on Saturday and you remembered on Friday? This is the only version that still works. And it prints more than once, so three copies for a family costs you paper rather than three books. Printed-and-posted copies from us are coming soon, if you would rather wait for one — but the file means the date is yours instead of a shipping estimate's.

How does that compare?

zapptales publish from €32.90 for a softcover of the first 100 pages, plus €4 per additional 50, and sell voice-note QR codes as a €9.90 add-on. My Forever Books is $59 for a paperback and $109 for a hardcover. Both figures were read from their own pages on 9 August 2026. This is one payment, per book, at roughly a third of that — and it is the only one you can reprint.

Why not wait?

Because WhatsApp counts backwards. An export gives you the most recent 40,000 messages, or 10,000 if you include the photos and voice notes — measured from today, not from the beginning. Every month you leave it, the oldest part of your chat slides past the edge of what can ever be exported, and nobody can get it back afterwards. That is the actual deadline. It has nothing to do with us.

Still not sure? Then don’t pay. Build the whole book free, read every page of it, and decide afterwards — or see how every service compares, with their prices dated and linked. If somebody else suits you better, use them.

Print-ready files is R349 per book, paid once — never a subscription. It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, no questions. Printed-and-posted books are coming soon — and they’ll carry our quality guarantee: damaged or misprinted, we reprint and reship free. The full cost breakdown, with worked examples, lives at what a WhatsApp book costs.

Full refund policy and terms — the 30-day guarantee has no conditions attached.

Every price here is in ZAR, and it is the price you pay — and when printed books open, they’ll be quoted by length, with the exact figure for your book shown before you are asked for a card. Nothing is charged until you press pay.