Groovebooks

When you announce that you are pregnant, suddenly you get added to a bunch of various Facebook support groups. Perhaps I was just naive, but I had no idea all of these groups existed. While some of them are very helpful, providing professional advice on feeding your baby or safe car seat practices, a majority of these groups are comedic. I can't believe how many people post in a group of random strangers asking for medical advice! 

Every once in awhile, someone shares something helpful or cool. Groovebook is one of those things. We take A LOT of pictures and were regularly spending $50 to print them at our local Sam's Club. Sam's has a great photo department (we created our birth announcements there and will be ordering our Christmas cards from there as well), but the spending was getting out of control. So, when I heard about Groovebooks, I immediately checked it out and was really surprised. I can't believe that everyone doesn't take advantage of this app!!

Here's the gist:

• This app was created by a Husband and Wife who had lost a ton of pictures they had stored on their phones
• They went on Shark Tank and eventually paired with Shutterfly, a very popular photo site, to provide their services
• The app is available in both the Android and Apple stores and is generally easy to use
• Each month, you upload between 40-100 photos from your phone and Groovebook will automatically ship you (for free!) a cute book of 4x6 photos with perforated edges for easy removal
• The overall cost is a monthly subscription of $2.99, plus tax. I have no idea how they make money, because this is a steal!!
• The pictures are good quality (based on what you upload) - however, I think the paper could be better. But it's tough to complain when it's so inexpensive!

We've been using Groovebook for about 4 months now and love it. I do have a couple of tips and criticisms though. First of all, it's a subscription, so if you don't upload at least 40 pictures in a month, they will charge you either way. Also, you will always get 100 pictures total. If you only upload 40, they will just print duplicates so that the book contains 100 photos. So I think the best thing to do is to upload 50 individual photos so that you get 2 of each. The worst thing I've encountered (not really a big deal, since the subscription is so cheap and shipping is free) is that it takes FOREVER to receive your book. The app notifies you when it's shipped and says it takes between 12-18 days to receive them. We've yet to receive them anywhere close to 12 days - so this isn't a great option if you need pictures quickly (although you can pay extra for expedited shipping).

If you want to share your photos with friends and family, you can easily add someone to your subscription so that they will automatically receive a copy of your book each month. We haven't added them, but I sent copies of 2 books to my parents. We ran into an issue last month because my parents didn't receive them (we didn't get ours either), so I e-mailed Groovebook's service. They were very helpful and replied quickly with a solution - they would resend our book and added credit for 2 free books to our account so that we could reorder them for my parents. Now that my parents received theirs, they are in love! They take them to bingo and to work to show all of their friends (our pictures are mostly of the baby, of course).

If you are interested in trying out Groovebooks, you can get your first book free by entering the code "Nicpon258." You can cancel your subscription at any time and I've found that this is a really helpful service, especially for new parents! The pictures are marked with the time and date they were taken and are easy to tear out of the booklets. They look great in frames and you can also buy products via the app (magnets, mouse pads, etc). This service has saved us so much money and I hope some of you give it a try!