Storii vs Storyworth (and where Yourtale fits)

By The Yourtale team · Published 20 September 2026 · 12 min read

Storii phones your parent up to three times a week, records a 15-minute answer, and gives the family an audiobook and a PDF. Storyworth sends one question a week and prints a hardcover. Storii costs $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. Storyworth costs $69 to $199 for the year with a book included. The choice is not voice against typing. It is whether you want an audio archive or a book on the shelf.

That framing matters more in 2026 than it did two years ago, because the old shorthand has stopped being true. Storyworth used to be the typing service and Storii the talking service. Storyworth's Color plan now records stories over the phone with automatic transcription, and its Unlimited plan runs weekly guided phone interviews (Storyworth pricing, retrieved 20 September 2026). Both services take voice. What separates them is what happens to the voice afterwards.

We built a third one, so we will say where ours sits and where it does not, with the same specificity we apply to theirs.

Key takeaways

• Storii is a phone service. Up to three automated calls a week, a life-like recorded voice reads a question, your parent presses 1 and talks for up to 15 minutes. Every call is recorded, transcribed, and given an AI rewrite within about two minutes (Storii FAQs, retrieved 20 September 2026).
• Storii's end artifact is digital. A downloadable audiobook and an eBook PDF transcript book, free for life after the subscription ends. Storii does not print and bind a hardcover for you. Its Keepbooks feature prints a life story record of the answered questions (Storii pricing, retrieved 20 September 2026).
• Storyworth is $69 Basic, $99 Color, or $199 Unlimited for the year, and a hardcover book credit is included in every plan. Unlimited auto-renews at $99 a year (retrieved 20 September 2026).
• Storii is $9.99 a month, $99.99 a year, or $119 for the physical gift box, per Storii's own written comparison, with no add-on fees (Storii, retrieved 20 September 2026).
• Storii does not operate in Norway and does not speak Norwegian. Its call list covers 17 countries, including Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands, in seven voice options. Check your parent's country before you buy.
• Yourtale is a $199 one-time AI interview. Your parent talks for as long as they want, up to 25 hours across as many sessions as they like. An AI drafts the chapters, your family edits them in plain language, and we print a color hardcover up to 200 pages. The real voice recordings and full transcripts stay with the family.

The mechanism is the product

Feature grids flatten these three into rows of ticks. They are not three sizes of one thing. Start with what each one actually does on a Tuesday afternoon.

Storii: an automated call, three times a week

Storii sends scheduled phone calls on days and times you pick, up to three a week. A chime plays. Then a synthetic voice says, in full: "Hello (Name), This is Storii with a new life story question. This call is recorded and answers you give may be shared with your family. Today's question is: '(question prompt)'. To repeat: '(question prompt)'. To start recording your answer, press 1 on the keypad. As a reminder, there is no operator on the line that can hear or respond to you. You have 15 minutes to record your answer and you can end the call at anytime by hanging up." (Storii FAQs, retrieved 20 September 2026).

Your parent presses 1 and talks. Nobody is listening. Nothing follows up. If the question was "tell me about your father" and the answer was two sentences, the call ends with two sentences and the next question arrives on Thursday.

The recording lands on a profile within minutes, with a transcript and an AI biographical rewrite under it. Connected family members get a text. Anyone with access can edit the transcript, edit the rewrite, and attach photos, videos or extra audio to the answer. There are over 1,000 prompts in the library, and you can write your own (up to 120 words, or 15 seconds if you record the question yourself).

Two constraints are worth knowing before you buy. Calls go to one number only, so a mother and father sharing a landline need two subscriptions rather than taking turns. And the whole thing runs on a phone line, which is the point: no internet, no smartphone, no app, no login required on the storyteller's end.

Storyworth: one question a week, and a book at the end

Storyworth sends one question a week for a year, by email or (on the Color and Unlimited plans) by text. Your parent replies by email or on the website. On Color they can also tell the story over the phone with automatic transcription, plus one Family Call a month where a relative joins the recorded call. On Unlimited they get a weekly guided phone interview and a weekly Family Call (Storyworth pricing, retrieved 20 September 2026).

At the end of the year, the stories and photos are printed as a professionally bound hardcover. One book credit is included in every plan. Storyworth's mechanism has always ended in a physical object, and the phone features added since are feeders into that object rather than a separate product.

Yourtale: one interview, as long as your parent wants it to be

Yourtale is the service we built. Your parent is interviewed by an AI, by phone or laptop, for as long as they want, across as many sessions as they want, up to a 25-hour cap. The interviewer follows what was just said rather than reading the next item on a list. If your mother mentions a brother she has not talked about in forty years, the next question is about him.

Every session is transcribed. The AI drafts each chapter from the transcripts. Your family reads the drafts, asks for changes in plain language, and the next version incorporates them. When you approve it, we print a color hardcover up to 200 pages. The original voice recordings and the full transcripts stay with the family.

There is no human writer at Yourtale editing your manuscript. You are the editor. That is the structural reason the price is $199 rather than several thousand, and we say so before purchase rather than after.

Storii vs Storyworth pricing in 2026

Sources: Storii pricing, Storii FAQs, Storii's Storyworth comparison and Storyworth pricing, all retrieved 20 September 2026.

Four notes on those numbers, because the sticker prices mislead in both directions.

Storii's prices are not in its pricing page. The plan cards load their figures in the browser after the page arrives, so the prices above come from Storii's own written comparison against Storyworth rather than from the pricing table. Storii describes the annual plan as "2 free months" against the monthly, and $9.99 times ten is $99.90, which is consistent with the $99.99 annual figure. Confirm the number at checkout before you buy.

Storii genuinely has no add-on fees. Their FAQ answers "Are there any additional fees?" with "Absolutely not," and the audiobook and PDF transcript book are free for life, including after you stop paying (Storii FAQs, retrieved 20 September 2026). Cancelling turns the profile read-only and you can still export everything. For a subscription product that is an unusually clean exit.

Storyworth's own page contradicts itself on price. The plan cards read $69 Basic, $99 Color, $199 Unlimited. The FAQ further down the same page still reads $59, $109 and $199 (retrieved 20 September 2026). The cards are the live prices. If you have read an older comparison quoting $59 and $109, including our own earlier pages, that is where the number came from.

The widely repeated "Storyworth plus $39 for a hardcover" is out of date. Storii's comparison page states Storyworth charges "$99.00 a year, and there is the possibility of paying an extra $39.00 for a hardcover book." A book credit is now included in all three plans, and $39 is the price of an extra black and white copy up to 480 pages. If you have budgeted $99 plus $39, you have budgeted for two books.

What you actually end up with

This is the part the price comparison hides, and for most families it is the whole decision.

Storii gives you an audio archive. The primary artifact is your parent's recorded voice, answer by answer, with a transcript and an AI-written prose version under each one. You can download it as an audiobook and as an eBook PDF. It is organised as a set of answered questions, not as a narrative, and it stays that way. Storii's Keepbooks feature prints a life story record containing the populated questions, which is a printout of the archive rather than a bound memoir. If a hardcover on the shelf is the thing you pictured, Storii is not selling it.

Storyworth gives you a book. What arrives is a hardcover of what your parent wrote or said, in the order the prompts were sent, laid out with the photos they attached. It is a real object, professionally bound, printed in the USA with free domestic shipping. It is also, structurally, a printed sequence of answers rather than a written narrative. If your parent wrote generously it reads well. If they answered twelve prompts and stopped, the book is twelve prompts long.

Yourtale gives you a book and the recordings. The hardcover is drafted as chapters, not as a Q and A, because the source material is a continuous interview rather than 156 disconnected answers. The voice in the book is your parent's, because everything in it came out of their mouth. Alongside it you keep the raw audio and the full transcripts. We treat the recording as an artifact in its own right, not a by-product, because a grandchild who never met their grandmother will play the audio long after the book is read.

The arithmetic of three calls a week

Storii's cadence sets a ceiling most families never think about. Three calls a week for a year is up to 156 answers. At the 15-minute cap that is a theoretical maximum of 39 hours, though real answers run a few minutes, so a realistic year is closer to eight or ten hours of audio spread across 156 separate recordings.

That structure is good at some things and bad at others. It is very good at breadth: 156 prompts will touch corners of a life that no single conversation reaches. It is bad at depth, because the 15-minute clock and the absence of any follow-up mean a story gets one pass and no second question. Nobody asks "wait, what happened to the brother?"

Storyworth's cadence is 52 prompts over the same year and the same structural gap. One question, one answer, no follow-up, next week.

Yourtale inverts it. One interview that follows the thread is worse at systematic coverage and better at getting the story behind the story, which is why we cap at 25 hours rather than at a number of questions. Neither shape is universally right. A parent who freezes in open conversation does better with a prompt a week. A parent who talks for two hours once you get them going is wasted on a 15-minute voicemail.

Where each one fails

Every service in this category has a specific failure mode. Naming them is more useful than a score out of ten.

Storii: nobody is in the room, and no book arrives

Two risks, and they compound. The first is that the call is genuinely unattended. Storii tells the recipient there is "no operator on the line that can hear or respond to you," which is honest and also the thing that makes some elderly people hang up. Talking into a recorded silence for fifteen minutes is a skill, and not everyone has it.

The second is the artifact. A year of subscription produces files, not a book. Families who assumed a hardcover was coming discover at the end that printing one is their own project. If you want an audio archive, that is a feature. If you wanted the object, it is the whole problem.

Storyworth: the book only gets finished if your parent keeps going

The structural risk is unchanged since Storyworth launched. A year of weekly prompts assumes a year of weekly engagement from someone who may be 80 and may lose interest, health, or both in month three. The phone options on the upgraded plans lower the barrier but do not remove the cadence. The book is printed from whatever exists when the year ends.

We go through the specific complaints in Storyworth reviews, and the plans themselves in how much Storyworth costs.

Yourtale: your family has to do the editing

We do not assign a human writer to polish your chapters. If a draft has a flat passage or a chapter break in the wrong place, the family member reading it has to say so. The next draft fixes it, and chapters usually land on the second or third pass, but the editorial loop is yours.

That is the trade that makes $199 possible. If you want a professional to write the book while you do nothing, that is a ghostwriting service and it starts around $3,250, which we break down in what a memoir ghostwriter costs.

Does Storii work outside the United States?

Storii sends calls to 17 countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Guernsey, Israel, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, Finland, Denmark, the Philippines, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Colombia (Storii FAQs, retrieved 20 September 2026). Calls can be conducted in American English, British English, Australian English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Italian.

That list is worth checking against your own family before anything else. Norway, Sweden and Germany are not on it. Neither Norwegian nor German is among the voice options. If your parent lives outside the 17, Storii cannot call them, and no pricing comparison matters.

Which one fits your family

If you would rather do this yourself without paying anyone, recording a parent's life story covers the protocol, and questions to ask your grandparents covers the prompts.

Our own disclosure

Comparison articles written by one of the competitors owe the reader an explicit account of their own product, so here is ours.

Yourtale is AI-driven from the interview through the draft. The interviewer is an AI. The chapters are drafted by an AI from your transcripts. No Yourtale employee edits your manuscript. You do. When you approve the book, we print it.

We do not call the interviewer a friend or a companion. It is software with one job: ask good questions, listen, transcribe, draft. Your data is encrypted, stored in the EU, never used to train models, and deletable on request. The price is $199, one time, no subscription.

We are currently running a small cohort rather than an open checkout, so the buy button is a waitlist. The price above is what it costs when it opens.

Frequently asked questions

Is Storii better than Storyworth?

Neither is better in general. They produce different things. Storii produces an audio archive with transcripts, delivered as an audiobook and an eBook PDF, and does not print a bound hardcover. Storyworth produces a printed hardcover and includes one book credit in every plan. If the artifact you want is your parent's voice, choose Storii. If it is a book on the shelf, choose Storyworth.

How much does Storii cost?

Storii costs $9.99 a month, $99.99 a year, or $119 for the physical gift box, per Storii's own written comparison (retrieved 20 September 2026). Their FAQ states there are no additional fees, and the audiobook and PDF transcript book stay accessible for free after the subscription ends. Storii's pricing page loads its figures in the browser, so confirm the price at checkout.

How much does Storyworth cost in 2026?

Storyworth's plan cards read $69 for Basic, $99 for Color and $199 for Unlimited, each for one year, with a hardcover book credit included. Unlimited auto-renews yearly at $99. The FAQ on that same page still quotes the older $59 and $109 figures (retrieved 20 September 2026). Extra copies cost $39 for black and white up to 480 pages, $79 for color up to 300 pages, and $99 for color up to 480 pages.

Does Storii give you a printed book?

Not a bound hardcover. Storii's deliverables are a downloadable audiobook and an eBook PDF transcript book, free for life. The Keepbooks feature prints a life story record containing all the answered questions, which is a printout of the archive rather than a professionally bound memoir. If you want a hardcover from Storii material, printing and binding it is your own project.

Does Storyworth still require typing?

No. The Basic plan is typed replies by email or website. The Color plan adds telling stories over the phone with automatic transcription plus one Family Call a month. The Unlimited plan adds a weekly guided phone interview and weekly Family Calls for each storyteller (retrieved 20 September 2026). The old shorthand that Storyworth is the typing service and Storii the talking service is no longer accurate.

How many stories does Storii collect in a year?

Up to 156, at the maximum of three calls a week for 52 weeks. Each answer is capped at 15 minutes, so the theoretical ceiling is 39 hours of audio, though real answers are much shorter. The calls are unattended, so each question gets one answer and no follow-up.

Does Storii work in Norway?

No. Storii's call list covers 17 countries including Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands, but not Norway, and Norwegian is not among the seven voice languages (retrieved 20 September 2026). Check the country list before buying for a parent outside the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or Australia.

Can two parents share one Storii subscription?

Not properly. Storii states that calls go out to only one number, and while two people could technically take turns answering, Storii recommends separate subscriptions. Storyworth Unlimited is the plan in this comparison built for multiple storytellers on one purchase.

What happens to my stories if I cancel Storii?

The profile becomes read-only and everything stays stored. You can export your answers at any time, and the audiobook and PDF transcript book remain free to access. Storii's FAQ states you only pay during periods when calls are being sent or received.

Where does Yourtale fit between the two?

Yourtale is the option that ends with both artifacts. It is $199 once, with no subscription. Your parent is interviewed by an AI for up to 25 hours across as many sessions as they want, your family edits the AI-drafted chapters, and we print a color hardcover up to 200 pages. The original voice recordings and full transcripts stay with the family, so you get Storii's artifact and Storyworth's artifact from one purchase. The cost is that the editing is your family's work, not ours.

Do Storii or Yourtale use human writers?

Neither does. Storii produces an AI biographical rewrite of each transcript within about two minutes of the call. Yourtale's chapters are drafted by an AI from the interview transcripts and edited by the customer. If a human writer is non-negotiable, neither of these is the service, and a memoir ghostwriter starts around $3,250.

Where to go next

If you want the wider field rather than these two, Storyworth alternatives covers six services that ship a real book.

If the weekly-video-prompt model is also on your list, Remento vs Storyworth vs Yourtale compares the two prompt services against a full interview.

If a human ghostwriter is in scope, Storyworth vs StoryTerrace vs Yourtale puts a professional writing service next to both.

If you are pricing Storyworth specifically, how much Storyworth costs has the full plan breakdown and the renewal terms.

If the recorded voice is the part you care most about, how to preserve a parent's voice in a book covers what survives the transcription and what does not.

If you want to see how our interview feels before deciding, join the waitlist and we will send the first session when we open the next cohort.

Sources cited above

• Storii pricing page, retrieved 20 September 2026.
• Storii FAQs, retrieved 20 September 2026.
• Storii, Storyworth vs Storii, retrieved 20 September 2026.
• Storyworth pricing page, retrieved 20 September 2026.