What a personalized picture book costs

What $9.99 buys

There are no per-step fees and no upsell at the end. One price covers the whole book, from the first draft of the story to the finished file.

• A story written for one kid — not a name dropped into a template
• Illustrations for every page, in a single consistent style
• A human editor rewriting the words and approving every page
• Art regenerated when a page comes out wrong
• A print-ready PDF you keep

It's a file, not a parcel

What you buy here is the digital book. Nothing is shipped to you, so there's no delivery date to miss and no shipping cost to add.

We do print and bind hardcovers — but only in Japan, and we don't ship printed books abroad yet. That's why there's no price for one on this page: quoting a number for something you can't order would just be a way of taking your time. The PDF is print-ready at 210mm square, so any local print shop can bind a copy for you in the meantime.

How buying works

Checkout takes about a minute, and it's the only form you have to fill in.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the kid's name and age on the payment page, plus anything else you want in the story.
• You upload two or three photos of them on the page right after checkout — no email to write. That's what we draw the character from, so it's the one thing we can't start without. Prefer email? Send them to info@kater.jp instead.
• The finished PDF comes back to the address you paid with within 7 business days of us having the photos.

Buy the digital book — $9.99

Why it isn't hundreds of dollars

Some personalized-book companies advertise "no AI." We'd rather just tell you the truth: AI is the reason this costs $9.99. A custom-written, custom-illustrated book made entirely by hand runs into the hundreds.

But AI on its own writes forgettable stories and draws hands wrong, so no book leaves here until a person has read it. We wrote out exactly which parts are the machine and which parts are a person on the how it works page.

If we miss it, you get your money back

Every book is finished by hand and we take a limited number at a time. If we can't get yours done within 7 business days of receiving your photos, we refund you in full — you don't have to ask for it.

And if the book isn't right

Reply to the email and tell us what's wrong and we'll redo it. A page whose art missed, a detail we got backwards, a name spelled the other way. If it still isn't a book you'd want to read to them, tell us and we'll refund you.

Related pages

• How it works — the four steps, and where the AI stops
• FAQ — photos, page count, printing, timing