Compared with Storyworth
One person's whole life, or one day from everybody who was there.
Storyworth and How We Saw It both end in a printed book, and they collect almost opposite things to get there. Here is the difference in plain terms, including when you should use them instead of us.
What Storyworth does
Storyworth is a memoir service, usually bought as a gift for a parent or grandparent. It emails or texts the storyteller one question a week, drawn from a library of several hundred or written by the buyer. They answer by email, on the website, or by recording their voice over the phone.
After a year of weekly questions, the answers are published as a hardcover book. Their own line for it is "Help them see their life in a whole new light."
It is a well-made product and for the job it does we would not try to talk you out of it.
Checked against their own site on 13 October 2026. They may have changed things since, and prices in particular move. Check with them before deciding.
What How We Saw It does instead
We do not collect one person's life. We collect one event, from everybody who was at it.
You create the event, write the sections you want covered, and send one link. The people who were there write their own version under each heading. Nobody needs an account and nobody waits a year: most collections fill up in a fortnight, because the thing being remembered just happened.
What comes back is the part no single person can give you. Six people at the same wedding saw six different days, and five of them saw things the couple missed entirely.
Side by side.
| Storyworth | How We Saw It | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes | One storyteller | Everybody who was there |
| What it covers | A whole life | One event, in sections you choose |
| Who sets the questions | Their library, or the buyer | You write the sections yourself |
| How long it takes | A year of weekly prompts | As long as your people take, usually weeks |
| The point of it | Preserving a person | Preserving an occasion from every side |
| Ends in a book | Yes | Yes |
Which one you actually want.
Use Storyworth instead if
- You want one person's life recorded, start to finish, in their own words.
- You are buying a present for a parent or grandparent and the gift is the asking.
- A year of gentle weekly prompts suits the person better than one concentrated ask.
- The value is in their voice alone, and other people's versions would only get in the way.
Use How We Saw It instead if
- The thing you want to keep is an occasion rather than a person.
- You were there too, and you know perfectly well you missed half of it.
- You want the bits only somebody else noticed, which no amount of asking yourself will produce.
- You want it collected now, while people still remember the details.
Plenty of people will want both, and they are not in competition. Storyworth for your mother's life. How We Saw It for her seventieth, told by the forty people who came.
Questions.
- Can more than one person contribute to a Storyworth book?
- Their site says the Unlimited plan supports multiple storytellers and that custom books allow family and friends to collaborate, so yes, up to a point. The shape of the product is still one person answering weekly questions about their own life. Collecting many people's accounts of a single occasion is a different job, and the one we are built for.
- Do you take a year like they do?
- No. Their year of weekly prompts exists because a life takes that long to cover. One event does not. You send the link, people write their part, and the story is assembled when you are ready.
- Do we get a printed book too?
- Yes. Once enough has been collected, the story can be turned into a printed keepsake.
Storyworth keeps a person. We keep a day.
If the thing you are trying to hold on to is an occasion rather than a lifetime, start there.
Start a collection