How much to spend on a child's present

Why no other shop's prices are here

You'd expect a page about budgets to list what things cost. This one names no prices except our own, for two reasons worth stating before you read the rest.

The first is that we sell one of the things you might buy, so any comparison table we wrote would be marking our own homework. The second is that prices move. A number typed here today is wrong within a year and stays on the page looking authoritative, which is worse than not writing it.

So the amounts below describe your budget, not a catalog. They're bands, and what matters about a band isn't what it buys. It's what it forces you to choose between.

Three questions that set the number

Before the amount, the situation. Almost every case of getting this wrong comes from answering these without noticing you'd answered them.

• Who else is in the room when it's opened? A present opened alone with a parent is judged on its own. A present opened eleventh in a row at a party is judged against the ten before it. That single fact moves the sensible number more than the child's age, the occasion, or how well you know them.
• Is this reciprocal? If their child will be buying for yours in March, you're setting a number for both families, not one. Going high once is generous. Going high on a standing arrangement is a bill you've handed someone else.
• Whose house does it live in? You pay once. The people it lives with pay in floor space, noise and the argument about tidying it up, every day, for years. Spending more frequently means handing over a larger ongoing cost that isn't yours.

What each band forces you to choose

Under about fifteen dollars

At this level you're buying one thing, and it has to be honest about being one thing. What works here is anything that gets used up — art materials, something edible, a single good paperback — or anything small that gets kept for a long time. What doesn't work is a miniature version of a larger present, which reads as a compromise from across the room.

The real risk in this band is the setting rather than the money. Opened one-on-one it's fine. Opened in a stack at a party it can disappear, and that's about the pile, not about you.

Roughly fifteen to thirty-five

This is where most presents for other people's children sit. It's a comfortable band and it has one specific failure mode: duplication. It's the band the popular thing of the year lives in, which means it's the band where three of them show up at the same party.

The way out is not to spend more. It's to buy something that can't arrive twice — something made for this child, something local to where you live, something the parents can't have bought themselves because it involves you.

Roughly thirty-five to seventy-five

Now you're in family territory: grandparents, godparents, an aunt who sees them twice a year. The constraint stops being money and becomes space. At this level you're usually buying something with a footprint, and the parents have opinions about footprints that they will not share with you until it's in the hallway.

The right move in this band is to ask one question of a parent before buying, which is not the same as asking them what to get. The guide on buying for a child whose house is full is mostly about how to ask it.

Above that

This is no longer a present decision, it's a household one — a bike, a device, an instrument. Two things follow. You have to clear it with a parent first, because you may be buying a thing they've decided against. And you may put everyone else at the party in an awkward position, which is a real cost even though it doesn't appear on the receipt.

What more money doesn't fix

Worth being blunt about, because it's where most of the anxiety in this question actually comes from.

• Not knowing the child. If you don't know what they're into, a more expensive wrong present is still a wrong present, and it's harder for a parent to quietly pass on.
• Whether it gets used. The things that get used are the things that fit the space and the household's tolerance for noise. Neither correlates with price.
• Whether they remember it was from you. Children remember who gave them things when the object says so. A cheap thing with a name written in it wins this outright against an expensive thing without one — the guide on what to write inside is about that line.

Where this book sits, and what it really costs

Ours is $9.99, which puts it in the lowest band on this page. That number is not the whole cost, and it would be dishonest to leave it there.

What you buy is a print-ready PDF. If you want a physical book, printing is on you and it's a second cost. The routes run from cheapest to dearest in a predictable order — your own printer, then a copy shop, then a photo-book service, which is the only one that comes out looking like something bought in a store. The guide to printing it walks through all four and what each one gives up.

So this is a present whose band you choose after buying it, which is unusual and occasionally useful. The same file is a small extra alongside something else, or the main present bound properly, depending on what you do next.

Where it's a poor fit: a party where twenty presents are opened one after another. A book about the birthday child needs a minute of attention to land, and that minute doesn't exist in a room full of children waiting for the next one. Hand it over separately, or send it to arrive the day after.

Situations that move the number

• A group going in together. Several small budgets buy one present that none of them could alone. The thing to settle first is whose name goes on it, because a present from six people is from nobody in particular unless you write the six names down.
• Siblings. Equal and equivalent are different targets. Small children tend to count objects rather than compare value, so two presents at the same price and different sizes is a fight, and two at different prices and the same size usually isn't.
• A child you barely know. A colleague's kid, a neighbor's. Stay in the middle band and pick something that doesn't presume: consumable, or clearly about the occasion rather than about the child.
• A party with a goody bag. If the host is sending every guest home with something, they've already set the tone for the day. Matching that scale is the polite read; exceeding it hard makes the host's own effort look small.
• Two occasions close together. A December birthday, or a birthday three weeks after a holiday. Splitting one budget across both is normal, and saying so out loud to the parents stops the second one reading as an afterthought.

Asking without making it strange

The question that works isn't what should I get. That one makes a parent do your thinking, and the polite answer is always oh, don't worry about it.

Ask about the ceiling instead — is there an amount that would be too much — and ask what they've already run out of room for. Both are easy to answer honestly, and between them they rule out most of the ways this goes wrong.

How ordering works

Three steps, and the first two are done before you close the tab — nothing to install, nothing to post.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the child's name, age and whatever you want in the story on the payment page.
• You upload two or three photos of them on the page you land on straight after checkout — pick the files and you're done, no email to write. Prefer email? Send them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with instead.
• The finished book comes back to the address you paid with as a print-ready PDF within 7 business days. If we miss that, you get a full refund without asking.

One thing worth knowing before you count backwards from a date: we're in Japan, so business days here are Japanese weekdays. Weekends and Japanese public holidays don't count, and they don't fall on the same days as yours. How the 7 days are counted is written out on the refund page. If your date is tight, email us before you pay and we'll tell you whether it fits.

Related pages

If you already know the occasion

• A birthday book where the birthday kid is the main character — What to tell us so the story sounds like this year's version of them
• The part of the basket that is still around next week — What survives the week after Easter, and why the printing has to happen before Sunday

More guides

• What personalized means — Name-swap, template and written-for-one-kid compared, and how to tell which you're buying
• Buying an AI-made book — Six questions worth asking any seller of AI-made books, with our answers beside them
• Last-minute gifts — What still works at two weeks, at one week, and on the night before
• Gifts by age — Age by age from 3 to 8: what shifts, and where a picture book fits
• Printing the PDF — Four ways to turn the file into a physical book, and what each one gives up
• What to write inside — Six inscriptions, what makes each one work, and where to put them
• When they have everything — Sorted by the constraint each idea respects: space, noise, screen time, duplication
• Reading it together — What the first read is like, why the tenth matters more, and what to say if they ask who made it
• Choosing the photos — What each of the two or three photos is doing, and the shots that can't be used
• Gifts across a border — Sorted by what a border breaks: time, cost, standards, sizing, and the address
• Giving a gift with no box — What goes in the box when the present is a file, and what to do from a distance
• All occasions — who people buy these for, one page each