Plum Print is a good company with a pricing problem. That goes first, because most "alternative" articles are written by competitors who would rather you thought otherwise.

They hold 4.5 out of 5 across 382 Trustpilot reviews. People love the books. What people do not love is finding out what the book costs after they have already paid a deposit and mailed a box of their children's original artwork across the country.

What Plum Print actually costs

Their site makes this hard to assemble, so here it is in one table. Every figure below comes from plumprint.com/pages/pricing and their FAQ, checked on 2 September 2026.

Product	First 20 pieces	Each additional piece
Express Book, 8×8 in	$99	$2.50
Art Book, 10×8 in	$175	$2.60
Card Book, 10×8 in	$199	$3.00
Art Book, 13×11 in	$210	$2.85
Digitizing only (hi-res images)	$99	$2.25

On top of that: a $49.99 deposit up front, credited against your final invoice. Custom captions are $1.50 each. Duplicate copies are 50% off. Books ship free. And getting your child's original artwork back is $24.99, which is not included by default.

The Express Book is the one to know about, because most comparison articles miss it entirely and quote $175 as the floor. It is not. With the Express Book you supply your own shipping box and postage rather than getting a prepaid kit, which is why it is cheaper.

A worked example. Forty pieces in the 10×8 hardcover: $175 + (20 × $2.60) = $227. Add $24.99 if you want the originals back and you are at roughly $252 for one book. That lines up with what reviewers report paying, including one who wrote "$375 for 40 pages?!" after their pieces were laid out one per page.

The three complaints that come up again and again

Reading through the Trustpilot reviews, the negatives cluster tightly.

The total arrives late. The deposit is paid before you know the price. One reviewer put it plainly: fees "are hard to find and if I had known the complete price up front, I would not have considered this worth it." This is structural rather than dishonest, because the price genuinely depends on a piece count nobody knows until the artwork is photographed. But it means the deposit functions as a commitment device: by the time you see the invoice, your children's originals are already in North Carolina.

Layout drives the price. Several reviewers expected multiple pieces per page and got one artwork per page, which inflates the count and therefore the bill. If you care about this, say so before they start.

Getting the art back costs more than people expect. The published figure is $24.99, but reviewers report being quoted far more in practice, including "$60 to get my three kids art work mailed back" and one report of $100. Budget for it, or decide in advance that you are not asking for it back.

Who Plum Print is genuinely right for

Skip the rest of this article if this describes you. It is a good service and there is no point pretending otherwise.

• You have a real volume problem, somewhere between 20 and 350 pieces, and the goal is to get it out of the closet.
• Your budget for solving that is $200 or more.
• A lot of the art is bulky or three-dimensional, the kind that photographs badly on a kitchen table. Their studio photography is the thing reviewers praise most, and it is better than what you will manage at home.
• You can wait roughly two months and you are comfortable mailing the originals.

That is a real job and Plum Print does it well. Every alternative below is for people whose job is a different one.

Alternative 1: Artkive, if you still want mail-in

Artkive is the direct competitor and the closest substitute. Same model: a box arrives, you fill it, they photograph everything and make a hardcover book.

The differences that matter: the box is currently $10 on promotion against a $39 list, and there is a $75 deposit if the box is not returned within six months, which covers your first 25 pieces and credits toward the final order. Books come in 8×8 or 11×8.5 inches and take 25 to 350 images.

Artkive has the same pricing-opacity problem, and says so openly: "You'll receive an invoice based on the number of art pieces you've sent." Third-party reviews put a 25 piece hardcover around $114. Note that Artkive publishes its own Artkive vs Plum Print comparison, which is worth reading with the obvious caveat in mind.

Alternative 2: do it yourself

Photograph the pieces and lay them out in any photo book. This costs the price of the book, which is to say a fraction of $227.

The honest downsides: it takes an evening or three, and your photographs will be worse. Flat paper shot in daylight from directly overhead is fine. Curling, glittery, three-dimensional, or larger-than-your-table art is where a home setup falls apart and where the studios earn their money. If most of your pile is flat drawings on standard paper, DIY is the sensible answer and nobody should talk you out of it.

Alternative 3: stop archiving and make one thing instead

None of the mail-in services ask the obvious question, because the answer is bad for them: do you actually need all 200 pieces preserved?

Most parents who go looking for a Plum Print alternative are not really trying to build a complete archive. They are trying to not throw away something that matters. Those are different problems, and the second one is much cheaper to solve.

DoodleTale works from the opposite end. You photograph one drawing, the one you would actually be sad to lose, and upload it. The AI builds a character from that specific drawing and writes an original 30 page story around it, with your child as the named hero. Nothing gets mailed, nothing leaves your house, and the originals stay exactly where they are, curl and all.

A printed 8×8 inch softcover is $29.99 with free shipping in the US and Canada, and a digital edition is $9.99. You see the entire book free before you decide whether to pay, and no account is needed to see it. Full specifications are on the printed book page.

The comparison is not really about price, although $29.99 against $252 is not nothing. It is about what the object is. A Plum Print book is a catalog: here is everything you made in 2025, reproduced faithfully. A DoodleTale book is a story: here is what happened to the monster you drew. Children respond to those very differently, and that is cheaper to work out before you spend either amount.

	Plum Print	DoodleTale
What you send	A box of original artwork	A photo of one drawing
What you get	Archive book, 20 to 350 pieces	A 30 page illustrated story
Price	$99 to $250+ plus $49.99 deposit	$29.99 printed, $9.99 digital
Originals	Mailed away, $24.99 to return	Never leave the house
Time	About two months	Minutes to preview
See it before paying	No, invoice comes after	Yes, the whole book

The timing nobody plans for

The price gets the complaints, but the timeline is what ruins gifts.

Plum Print's FAQ says turnaround is "about three to four weeks after your materials arrive in our studios," and then 5 to 7 business days to ship once you have approved the proof and paid the invoice. Their process page elsewhere says four to six weeks. Take the longer figure when you plan.

That is only the middle of the journey. The full sequence is: order the kit, wait for it to arrive, fill it, mail it back, wait for photography, wait for the proof, approve the proof, pay, wait for printing, wait for delivery. One first-hand reviewer timed the whole round trip at just under two months.

The step that catches people is the proof approval loop, because it is the one part that depends on you. If the proof lands while you are away for a week, that week is added to the total. Plum Print's own holiday page makes the shape of this obvious: their Christmas deadlines require materials to arrive by December 1 and the proof approved and invoice paid by December 12, a full twelve days before the shipping deadline. That gap is the review loop, and it is the single most common reason a personalized order misses a date.

A rush option of roughly two weeks exists, but it is not on the pricing page. You have to email them.

If you are ordering for a specific occasion, work backwards from the date and add two weeks of slack you do not think you need. If you have less than two months, the mail-in route is not the right one and no amount of paying for faster shipping will fix it, because the delay is in production and approval rather than transit.

If you do go the DIY route, three things help

Since DIY is the right call for a pile of flat drawings, here is how to not do it badly.

Shoot in daylight, never with flash. Put the drawing flat on the floor near a window on an overcast day, hold the phone directly overhead so the paper edges stay parallel to the frame, and let your own shadow fall outside the shot. Flash blows out crayon wax and makes marker look patchy.

Crop to the paper, not the art. Keeping the full sheet, torn corners included, reads as an artifact rather than a scan. This is the thing the studios deliberately do not do, and it is arguably better.

Photograph the back. Children write things on the back. Dates, names, an explanation of what the picture is. That is frequently the part you will care about most in ten years, and every mail-in service will discard it.

What we would actually tell you to do

If the closet is the problem, use Plum Print or Artkive and go in with the real numbers: budget the deposit plus roughly $2.60 a piece, decide up front about the return fee, and ask about layout before they start. Do not let the deposit be the moment you commit.

If one drawing is the problem, and it usually is, do not buy an archive. Photograph the drawing your child would recognize across a room and turn that one into something they will actually read. There is a broader comparison of apps that turn kids' drawings into books if you want to see the whole category, and a walkthrough of how mail-in services work if you are still weighing that route.

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Prices verified on plumprint.com and artkiveapp.com on 2 September 2026. Both companies change pricing; check before ordering.