Shoebox vs Google Photos premium print series
This is the one company selling what we sell, out of the library we read: ten 4×6 prints a month, $6.99 at their last published price, from 2020. Theirs costs under half of ours at $14 and their software picks the ten; ours hands you a shortlist and waits.
Side by side
| What | Shoebox | Google Photos premium prints |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $14 a month, shipping included — $1.40 a print, whatever kind of month you had. | Their help centre publishes no price. Google’s own launch post put it at $6.99 a month including shipping, before tax — that post is from 2020, so check the figure in the app before you subscribe.1,2 |
| What arrives | Ten loose 4×6 prints, flat in an envelope, every month. | Ten photos on 4×6 card stock, every month. Matte or glossy, with or without a one-eighth-inch border, and a print can carry the date on the back or be a postcard.1 |
| Ten prints, all in | $14, mailed. | Ten prints and the postage for $6.99 at their 2020 price — under half of ours, for the same count.1,2 |
| A year of it | $168: twelve months at $14, shipping in it. | Our arithmetic on their 2020 price: about $83.88 for twelve months of ten prints, postage in it.2 |
| Shipping | Included, within the United States and Canada. | In the subscription, and it cannot be upgraded. Posted within the United States only, 10 to 14 working days.1 |
| Minimum order | Ten prints a month, fixed. | Ten a month, fixed. The same count as ours.1 |
| Sizes | 4×6 prints, one size, nothing else. | The subscription is 4×6 card stock and nothing else. Ordered one by one, their prints run to 20×30 and their store sells books and canvases.1,3 |
| Paper | Photo paper from a professional lab, lustre finish. | Card stock, matte or glossy, your pick.1 |
| Turnaround | Locks on the 10th; prints arrive within about a week. | Five days to change the selection, then 10 to 14 working days in the post.1 |
| Who chooses | You do. We shortlist about a hundred and you pick the ten. | They do. Ten are picked automatically on favourites, recent edits, upload time, resolution, duplicates and the people and pets it has learned; you get five days to swap any of them.1 |
| A month you do nothing | Nothing prints and the membership still bills. Cancel in Settings if you want the charges to stop. | The ten they picked print and ship on their own. That is the point of it.1 |
| Commitment | $14 a month until you cancel. | Cancel any time — but cancel on the last day of the review window or after it, and that month still bills.1 |
| Where photos go | Sorted by a model on our own server. No photo goes to an AI company; print copies are deleted once the lab confirms it has them. | Already on Google’s servers, and their software picks the ten — their own post calls it machine learning. Read their terms before you decide.1,2 |
Checked 29 July 2026. Their column comes from their own pages. 1. Google Photos help: about premium print series (support.google.com). 2. Google’s announcement of the print series (October 2020) (blog.google). 3. Google Photos help: print product and shipping information (support.google.com).
What it is
A subscription inside Google Photos. Every month it picks ten photos out of your own library, prints them on 4×6 card stock and posts them, with the postage in the price. You get five days to swap any of the ten before they go to print, and it posts within the United States only.
It is the same shape as Shoebox, from the same library — we read your photos through Google Photos as well. So the honest question is not whose product this is. It is who chooses the ten, and what that is worth.
Where Google’s is better
- Price. Ten prints from them is about $6.99 at their last published price, from 2020, against $14 from us. That is under half of ours, for the same count, and no argument of ours closes that gap.
- Nothing new to sign up for. If your photos are already in Google Photos, it is a switch inside an app you have. No second account, no card typed anywhere else.
- More to fiddle with. Matte or glossy, a border or none, the date on the back, each print as a postcard. We print one way: 4×6, lustre, no border.
- Nothing to think about at all. If you never open the review email, ten reasonable photos still arrive. That is the version of this that asks the least of you.
What you trade
Their software chooses. It reads favourites, recent edits, upload time, resolution, duplicates and the people and pets it has learned, and it is good at it — but the ten that land are the ten it liked, and you have five days to notice. Miss the window and the month prints itself.
Ours runs the other way round. A model on our own server cuts thousands of photos down to about a hundred, and then nothing prints until you pick ten. Two minutes of yours, once a month, is the whole ask — and it is also the reason the envelope is worth opening.
One more difference worth naming, because we make a promise about it: your library already sits on Google’s servers, and their sorting happens there. Choosing us does not move it. What we can say is that our curator runs on our own machine, no photo of yours reaches an AI company through us, and the print copies are deleted once the lab confirms it has them.
The honest arithmetic
Twelve months of theirs comes to $83.88 at their 2020 price, against $168 for twelve months of ours — under half of ours. Both figures are in the table above, and the gap buys one thing: that the ten prints on your table are the ten you picked, out of a hundred you were shown.
If you do not much mind which ten, theirs is the better buy and we would rather say so here than have you find out after a year of paying us.
Which to pick
Pick Google’s if you want prints in the post for as little as possible, you are in the United States, and you are happy for a machine to choose them.
Pick Shoebox if choosing is the part you want — and if you would rather the sorting happened on a server that sells nothing else. The other alternatives are worth reading first.
Start this month
Ten prints a month that you chose, from a shortlist that takes two minutes.
$14 a month, shipping included, within the United States and Canada. Cancel any month.
Prices here were read from the companies' own sites on 29 July 2026. They change their prices and their products, so check theirs before you decide. Every name belongs to its owner and we are not connected to any of them. If we have got something wrong, write to hello@shoeboxprints.com and we will fix it.