My wife has started using an App (recommended by my sister) which gives her 24 free photo prints per month. All she pays is postage (£2:50 for first order and £3:99 thereafter).
She has received her first photobook, thus so far so good. My sister has been using it for some months.
However it is a business model that seems to me to be unsustainable. They may make money from extra prints, but I suspect most people will be using the free print option. Something that costs them.
I’m very sceptical. Can anyone reassure me that sometime in the future my wife won’t find the credit card account empty?
Too good to be true? How does this work?
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Hi Carl, is it the one below? In this case, the business model seems to be adverts printed on the back of the photos which seems fair enough.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/flags-new-app-offers-free-ad-supported-photo-prints-no-shipping-fees-required/
I understand your concern, I heard an advert on the radio last year for someone who were offering such a service, and I was asking myself the same question, i.e. how did they make money? The only thing I could think of at the time was that there was something in the small print that meant that you were signing away the rights of the images to them, but even so, I still couldn’t see how much money that would make them. Especially as in my case we would be talking about photos of a middle-aged guy posing next to the Bon Scott statue at Fremantle.
No, there aren’t any ads there.
It is an App called Freeprints Photobooks.
The prints are of a very decent quality. Maybe I have read too many crime books and I’m wondering if this is a “Long-con”.
Could there be a margin in the postage? I guess so, but with today’s postal rates, it must be small.
Perhaps they hope to eventually get you to spend money on the expensive canvas wall prints, photo cushions, mugs etc., where the mark up is bigger.
Perhaps like people who sell small items for 1p on amazon the small margin of profit is in the p+p.
@carl we’ve been using that service for a year, never had any issues. We use the photobook option. My guess is that they use the postage to break even on the basic free product and look to make profit on the extras. It’s not ‘free’ of course, just that their basic product is priced as postage only.
Thanks. That’s reassuring.
I think it is smart marketing. Mostly word of mouth and no expensive adverts. I just checked it out – see it works!. You pay for additional pages, fancier finishes or bigger sizes and hardback covers. I had a play and was doing a holiday book and it was going to cost £5.95 – for an 8×7 (free upgrade but it was 35p per addtional page. Keeping to 20 for my holiday book was tricky. £5.95 for a hardback photo book seems reasonable though – which I assume is how they make money.
Could it be the same reason as for all these bike sharing startups that are now dumping bikes on the streets of Sydney? Data mining. They want your credit card … http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/data-mining-is-why-billions-are-being-pumped-into-dockless-bikes/021696
That’s a possibility – which the two part series presented on BBC2 by Jamie Bartlett (part 2 was last night, but it is on iPlayer) Secrets Of Silicon Valley would indicate.