Apple / photo_and_video / FREEPRINTS PHOTOBOOKS
REVIEW
FreePrints Photobooks turns a camera roll into a keepsake for the cost of shipping.
PlanetArt's app gives you a 20-page softcover every month for $7.99 flat. The auto-layout is smart, the print is better than it has any right to be, and the catch is exactly what you'd expect.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 9, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
PlanetArt’s pitch sounds like a scam until the first book arrives. One free 20-page softcover every month, in 5x7 or 6x6, stitched and laminated, printed on real satin paper, in exchange for a flat $7.99 shipping charge that doesn’t move whether you order one book or six. There is no subscription. There is no trial. The deal next month is the same as the deal this month.
The book that lands on your kitchen counter looks like something you’d buy, not something an algorithm assembled at midnight. The auto-layout reads a folder of photos, deduplicates the obvious bursts, picks reasonable groupings, and gets you to a finished spread in roughly the time it takes to remember what you were doing in September. For most people, most of the time, that’s the entire job.
The honesty test is what you compare it to. Set this next to the $80 lay-flat hardcover that Artifact Uprising or Mixbook will print, and the FreePrints book is thinner, slightly warmer in colour, and trimmed with consumer rather than heirloom precision. Set it next to the camera roll you’ve been meaning to print since 2019 and have not, and it is the only photo book in the room.
The free softcover lands on your kitchen counter looking like something you'd buy, not something an algorithm assembled at midnight.
FEATURES
Open the app and it asks for a folder, an event, or a date range. Point it at September's beach trip and it will pull the photos, deduplicate the obvious bursts, lay out a 20-page 5x7 or 6x6 softcover in under a minute, and let you redrag any spread you don't like. The auto-layout is the headline feature — it does roughly what you'd do manually, just faster, with the kinds of two-up and four-up arrangements a person would actually pick.
The free monthly book is one 20-page standard softcover in 5x7 or 6x6, stitched and laminated, printed on a satin-finish archival page. Additional pages are a small per-page upcharge. Shipping is a flat $7.99 no matter how many books or how big the order, and US copies typically land in under a week. Premium tiers — 6x8, 8x8, 8.5x11.5, and 12x12 hardcovers — are paid outright and ship from the same fulfilment chain.
Photo sources include the camera roll, iCloud, Facebook, Dropbox, and your previous FreePrints orders, which is useful if you re-print a book a year later for a relative. There are no subscriptions and no commitment to claim the next month's free book.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pricing model is the whole pitch and it actually delivers. Pay $7.99, get a real photo book in the mail every month, indefinitely. The softcover that arrives is not a flimsy giveaway — the satin paper holds skin tones cleanly, the stitched binding lies open without cracking, and the laminate cover has survived a year on our test coffee table without yellowing.
Auto-layout is the second quiet win. Most consumer photo-book apps either dump every photo at one-per-page or force you to drag each spread by hand. FreePrints picks reasonable groupings, respects the orientation of each shot, and gets you to a finished book in roughly the time it takes to pick the photos. For grandparents, a kid's school year, or the trip you keep meaning to print, that's the entire job done.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
This is keepsake-grade, not gift-tier. The free softcover is exactly the right object for a fridge shelf or a bedside drawer; it is not the heirloom hardcover you'd hand a parent at a 50th anniversary. The paper is thinner than what Mixbook or Artifact Uprising will sell you, the colour gamut runs slightly warm on skin, and the trim tolerances drift a millimetre or two. The premium hardcovers narrow the gap but don't close it — at that size and price point the dedicated photo-book studios still print a better object.
The app also has a habit of losing in-progress projects. Recent App Store reviews repeat the same story: a book half-laid-out vanishes between sessions, and support — increasingly handled by a chatbot — can't recover it. There is no pre-flight warning when you drop a low-resolution photo into a 12x12 spread, so blurry full-bleed pages show up at the door. Both are fixable with cloud autosave and a resolution check; neither has been fixed in the last several releases.
CONCLUSION
Treat FreePrints Photobooks as the rolling family photo album you finally have an excuse to make. One book a month, $7.99 in shipping, ten minutes of auto-layout, and a real object in the mail by Friday. Anyone who has been meaning to print 2019 should install it tonight. Anyone planning a wedding album, a portfolio, or a gift that needs to feel premium should pay more elsewhere.