Compare

Every other way to do this, weighed honestly.

12 alternatives, from weekly email prompts to a ghostwriter. Facts come from each company's own pages, with links. Some of them are the right choice for some families, and we say so.

At a glance Services Other paths

	How stories are gathered	Follow-up questions	Price, as published
Tellforth	Voice visits of 15 to 20 minutes with a live interviewer that asks follow-ups, plus a 30-second daily card; no typing, no login for the teller	One record of every person, place, saying and story; the next question comes from what is still missing	$149 once; $208 printed; $449 for five editions
Storyworth	One emailed question a week; the storyteller types a reply (or dictates, converted to plain text)	None; the next week's question is the next in the queue	About $99 a year, auto-renewing (check their site)
Remento	One prompt at a time, answered by recording	—	About $99 a year (check their site)
Storii	Scheduled automated calls; one recorded question each	None	About $99 to $119 a year (check their site)
A ghostwriter	—	—	$2,000 to $50,000+
Doing it yourself	—	—	Your time
StoryTerrace	A matched writer interviews you in person or remotely; sessions of about 2 hours; 4 hours (Swift) or 4 to 10 hours (Classic) in total	Within the interview hours, yes: a human interviewer; nothing between sessions	About $150 (Book Taster), about $1,200 (Swift), from about $3,250 (Classic), from about $24,000 (PRO); check their site
My Life in a Book	One question at a time by email, 52 over a year; the teller types or uses voice-to-text	None stated; the next scheduled question follows	About $79 for the year-long programme and one book; extra copies about $40 (check their site)
No Story Lost	Two, four or six one-hour phone (or video) interviews with a human interviewer	Inside each hour, yes: a human asks; nothing between or after the booked hours	About $1,099 (2 interviews), $1,649 (4), $2,199 (6), $4,450 (Legacy); extra copies about $100 or $50 (check their site)
LifeBook Memoirs	11 to 14 face-to-face interviews at home with a LifeBook interviewer	Within the sessions, yes: a human interviewer; the number of sessions is fixed by the package	About $18,000 (The Royal), $27,000 (The Imperial), $42,000 (The Signature), each in six monthly payments (check their site)
Autobiographer	Audio conversations with an AI biographer in an iPhone app, as often and as long as you like	Conversational; the pages we read do not say what it remembers between conversations	About $99 one-time (marked limited time) or about $16 month to month on their home page; check their site
StoriedLife	Speak or type to Eva in the browser; Eva asks follow-ups; 30+ languages	Yes, within a conversation; the FAQ says the AI remembers your details	About $59, $98 or $118 for the first year, then about $89 a year; or an Annual Plan at about $129.95; extra printed books about $49 to $69 (check their site)
A chatbot	You interview, transcribe and paste; the chatbot responds to what is in front of it	Only within a chat, and only if you ask for them; nothing remembered from one session to the next	Free to about $20 a month for a chatbot subscription; your time is the cost

Prices and features of other products are as published on their own sites at the time of writing and may have changed. If something here is wrong, write to hello@tellforth.com and we will fix it.

Services

Other companies that help a family make a book.

Tellforth vs Storyworth

Storyworth, founded in 2013, is the original: it emails your parent one question a week for a year and binds the written answers into a hardcover.

Choose them if your parent likes to write and you want the simplest possible product with a long track record.

Full comparison

Remento is voice-first: prompts arrive by email or text, the storyteller records a video or audio answer, and its "Speech-to-Story" turns each one into a cleaned transcript or a polished written story.

Choose them if you want a quick, polished write-up of each answer and a large-format book.

Full comparison

Tellforth vs Storii

Storii calls the storyteller on a schedule (several times a week), asks a recorded question, records the answer and transcribes it.

Choose them if an automated call and an audio archive are enough.

Full comparison

Tellforth vs StoryTerrace

StoryTerrace is a ghostwriting service.

Choose them if you want a named human writer to interview your parent and shape the book, you are happy with four to ten hours of material, and the budget is in the low thousands.

Full comparison

Tellforth vs My Life in a Book

My Life in a Book is a Storyworth-style prompt service: 52 questions over a year (weekly, fortnightly, monthly or all at once), answered by typing or by voice-to-text, with photos, then printed as a full-colour keepsake book with a choice of 40 cover templates.

Choose them if you want the cheapest printed book of a parent's own written or dictated answers and they will keep up with a year of prompts.

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Tellforth vs No Story Lost

No Story Lost (Vancouver) is a done-for-you service: a human interviewer calls your parent for a fixed number of one-hour phone interviews, a team transcribes, writes and edits the stories "in the style and tone that our storytellers speak", lays them out with your photos, and prints a hardcover coffee-table book.

Choose them if you want a human team to do everything in about three months, two to six hours of interviews is enough, and the budget is one to two thousand dollars.

Full comparison

Tellforth vs LifeBook Memoirs

LifeBook Memoirs is the luxury end of the category.

Choose them if you want the finest physical object in the category, a writer and interviewer who come to the house, and the budget is tens of thousands.

Full comparison

Tellforth vs Autobiographer

Autobiographer is an iPhone app: you "talk with Dave, your AI biographer" in audio conversations as often and as long as you like, and the app writes your life story.

Choose them if your parent has an iPhone, likes talking to an app on their own schedule, and a digital life story written by the AI is what you want.

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Tellforth vs StoriedLife

StoriedLife (at storiedlife.ai; storiedlife.com is a "coming soon" placeholder) is a browser-based AI biographer called Eva.

Choose them if your parent tells their story best in a language other than English, wants to talk to an AI in the browser on their own schedule, and a yearly plan suits you.

Full comparison

Other paths