Compared with Tribute
Tribute makes a gift to watch. We make a record to read.
Both collect from a crowd through one link. One ends as a video you play at the party; the other ends as a story you can open again in ten years.
What Tribute does
Tribute is a group video gift. The creator sets up a page, sends the link, and friends, family and colleagues record video messages from their phones with no app to install. Tribute compiles the clips into one finished video, up to four hours long, either edited by the creator or polished by their team.
Keepsakes include a video book with a screen in it that plays the film when you open the cover. At the time of checking, DIY started at 35 US dollars and the concierge edit was listed at 99. They call themselves "the #1 group video gift maker".
As a thing to play in a room full of people, it is hard to beat.
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
A video message is usually addressed to the recipient: hello, happy birthday, we miss you. We ask for something else entirely, which is what the day was actually like from where that person was standing.
The creator writes the sections. Everyone writes their version under each. The accounts are woven into one story that runs in order, so it reads as an account of the event rather than a queue of greetings.
It can be read in five minutes or an hour, skimmed, searched, quoted in a speech, and printed.
Side by side.
| Tribute | How We Saw It | |
|---|---|---|
| What people send | A video message | Their written account, or spoken and written up |
| The result | One compiled video | One story in sections |
| Best moment for it | Played in the room on the day | Read afterwards, and again later |
| Can you skim it | Not really | Yes |
| Keepsake | Video book, USB, DVD | Printed book |
| Addressed to | The recipient | The event itself |
Which one you actually want.
Use Tribute instead if
- You want something to play at the party, and faces and voices are the whole point.
- The occasion is a gift to one person rather than a record of a shared event.
- Your people will happily film themselves but would never write anything down.
- You want it to land in one emotional go rather than be read at leisure.
Use How We Saw It instead if
- You want what people remember, not what they want to say to the camera.
- You want it readable in ten years without finding the file and a screen.
- Different people saw different parts and you want them lined up against each other.
- You want to print it.
There is a decent case for both: the video on the night, the written collection for afterwards. They are good at opposite ends of the same occasion.
Questions.
- Can people speak rather than write?
- Yes. They can record their memory aloud and it is written up for them, with the original recording kept. The difference from a video gift is what we ask them to talk about.
- Can we include photographs?
- Yes, attached to whichever memory they belong to, so the picture arrives with the story of it.
- Is there a video version of the finished thing?
- No. The finished thing is written, and can be printed. If you want a film for the day, Tribute or something like it is the right tool and we would say so.
Play the video on the night. Keep the story.
If you want the event itself held from every angle, that is the bit we do.
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