You’ve already written
the best book they’ll ever read.
Every good-morning text. Every voice note. Every 2am conversation. Kept in Print turns your WhatsApp chat into a real printed book your person can hold in their hands.
Anniversaries · Valentine’s · weddings · long distance · in loving memory
It doesn’t look like your chat.
It is your chat.
Every detail survives the journey from screen to paper.
Links become cards
That YouTube video you sent at 2am? The article that started a three-hour conversation? They render as rich preview cards — thumbnail, title, description — exactly like WhatsApp drew them.
Your story has chapters
Kept in Print maps every day you ever talked — so you can print the whole story, or just the chapter you want them to relive. The first hello. The month everything changed. All of it, or the part that’s theirs.
Your faces, on the cover
Add a photo for each of you. They flow through the chat header, the voice notes, and meet on the cover — where the heart used to be.
The last word is yours
Close the book with your own message on its own page — or pick one of ours. Then choose A4, A5, A6 or square, dark or light, and download a PDF any print shop can bind. Go on — try the sizes.
“…and this is just
the beginning.”
Three steps to the best gift
you’ve ever given.
No design skills, no installs — and nothing of yours kept once your book is in your hands.
Export
Open the chat in WhatsApp. On iPhone: Export Chat → Attach Media. On Android: ⋮ → More → Export chat → Include media. You get a .zip.
Upload
Drop it into Kept in Print — no need to open it. Your chat is read right here in your browser.
Hold it
Download the print-ready PDF and take it to any print shop.
Stuck on step one? Exporting on iPhone, on Android, or what to do when “Export chat” has vanished from the menu.
Everything we know, written down
Exporting, missing photos, message limits, what a chat costs to print, and honest comparisons with the other services — including where they beat us.
Read everything we’ve written — the gift guides, if a date in the diary sent you — or the free printing tools, if you already have a PDF.
A WhatsApp thing, done properly
More WhatsApp looks are coming — older eras, Android styling. Other apps aren’t. This is a WhatsApp thing.
Simple pricing
Pay per book, not per month. Gifts shouldn’t have subscriptions — and you shouldn’t have to guess: slide to your chat’s size and see your price.
Read it
Find out tonight whether your chat is the book you think it is.
- Read all of it — every page, before you decide anything
- Their face, your wallpaper, the voice notes — nothing stripped out
- One A5 PDF, yours to keep and re-read forever. No card, no trial clock.
- A faint mark across each page, and a line pointing home
- Made to be read, not to be bound — print it and you get paper, not a book
Print-ready files
Not permission to print your book. The four files that make one possible.
- A wraparound cover — back, spine and front on one sheet, the spine measured to your page count
- The inside pages with bleed, and the margin shifted page by page so nothing falls into the binding
- A second copy laid out two-to-a-sheet, to print and cut on your own printer tonight
- A note in the box for the print shop. You walk in and explain nothing.
- A long chat arrives as matching volumes, each with its own cover and spine
What actually lands in your downloads folder
One zip. Open it and this is what is inside — a folder to hand to a print shop, and a folder for the printer in your spare room.
START HERE — what is in this kit.txttwo paragraphs, no jargonTake this to a print shop/cover — wraparound.pdfback, spine and front on one wide sheet · bleed already includedinside pages.pdfcover and back cover removed, the binding margin shifted page by pageread me — for the print shop.txtpaper, finished size, spine width, print at 100%Print it at home/print THIS first — which way does your printer flip.pdffour sheets that tell you which file below is yourstwo pages per sheet — flip on SHORT edge.pdfdouble-sided, already in cut-and-stack ordertwo pages per sheet — flip on LONG edge.pdfthe same book, arranged for the other kind of printerread me — printing at home.txtwhich way to flip, where to cut, how to stack
A chat too long to bind as one book arrives with a volume 1, volume 2 and so on — each with its own cover, and its own spine measured to its own page count. The free PDF has none of these files. It is one A5 document, from the first page to the last.
Give a book
Only someone in the chat can make the book — but anyone can give the means. A prepaid voucher, as a gold card: “One book, on me.”
“R349 for a file?”
Fair question, and the answer is that it is not one file — it is the set above, and a note telling a printer what to do with them. Here is what people ask before they decide, and where it is cheaper to go elsewhere.
Can't I just print the free one?
You can, and nobody will stop you. Office A4, black and white or colour, any copy shop on the corner — it costs very little and it reads perfectly well. What comes back is a stack of paper. Our mark sits on every page, the cover is bound inside the book as page one, every trimmed edge shows a white sliver where the design was meant to run off, and the inside margin is identical on both sides of the sheet, so half your words end up in the glue. Right words, wrong object. Print it if you like — then look at what the kit prints.
And if I take the mark off?
You would still be holding the wrong file. The mark is the smallest of four differences: no wraparound cover, so there is no spine and nothing to letter down it; no bleed, so the white edges stay; no shifted margin, so the text goes into the binding; and one file however long the chat is, when anything past about 500 pages has to be bound as two. Worth knowing too: the mark is not sitting in your copy waiting to be edited out — it is laid on by our own printer at the moment the file is made, and the tools that promise to strip one usually flatten every page to a picture on the way through, which is precisely what a print shop cannot use. The money is not a fee to remove a watermark.
Why wait for the post at all?
With the files you don't. Download them the moment the book is finished, walk into any print shop, and hand it over tonight if you want to — most bind same-day. No two-week courier window, no customs desk, no tracking number to refresh. Anniversary on Saturday and you remembered on Friday? This is the only version that still works. And it prints more than once, so three copies for a family costs you paper rather than three books. Printed-and-posted copies from us are coming soon, if you would rather wait for one — but the file means the date is yours instead of a shipping estimate's.
How does that compare?
zapptales publish from €32.90 for a softcover of the first 100 pages, plus €4 per additional 50, and sell voice-note QR codes as a €9.90 add-on. My Forever Books is $59 for a paperback and $109 for a hardcover. Both figures were read from their own pages on 9 August 2026. This is one payment, per book, at roughly a third of that — and it is the only one you can reprint.
Why not wait?
Because WhatsApp counts backwards. An export gives you the most recent 40,000 messages, or 10,000 if you include the photos and voice notes — measured from today, not from the beginning. Every month you leave it, the oldest part of your chat slides past the edge of what can ever be exported, and nobody can get it back afterwards. That is the actual deadline. It has nothing to do with us.
Still not sure? Then don’t pay. Build the whole book free, read every page of it, and decide afterwards — or see how every service compares, with their prices dated and linked. If somebody else suits you better, use them.
Print-ready files: 30-day money-back, no questions. Printed-and-posted books are coming soon — they’ll be priced by how long your chat is, with the exact figure shown before you pay. Until then the print-ready file is the same book, and any print shop can bind it same-day. Want the full breakdown, with worked examples? See what a WhatsApp book costs.
Your love story deserves a shelf, not a scroll.
Create a memory — freeFrom the maker
Kept in Print started as a gift, not a product.
I wanted to print my chat with my girlfriend — the voice notes, the stickers, the 2am messages, all of it — and everything out there gave me the same thing: a template. Blue bubbles that looked like nobody’s actual phone. Our story, in someone else’s clothes.
So I built this. It recreates the chat the way you actually lived it, down to the wallpaper.
There’s no team behind Kept in Print. It’s one developer, updating features at night, paying for hosting out of pocket. That’s why a few export extras are paid — Print-ready files is what keeps the lights on. But I also know what it’s like when the money isn’t there, and I don’t think that should stop anyone from giving this to someone they love. So the free version is the whole book, every page, with a faint mark across it. Use it forever if you need to.
Go make someone feel loved.
— Shaun, Durban
Questions, answered
What happens to my chat?
Your chat is read and laid out in your browser. To print the book we send the finished pages to our servers, because a phone cannot print three hundred pages of real type. They are deleted as soon as your book reaches you — and if something goes wrong partway, within 48 hours in every case. We don't sell them, we don't share them, and nobody here reads them. We keep them for as short a time as we can precisely so that there is never a store of other people's private lives sitting on our side. The one thing that can outlive that is a book you paid for and asked us to keep — you tick a box at the moment you download it, and it goes to your library, privately, until you remove it. Untick it, which is how it starts, and we hold nothing. (Link previews fetch public page titles through our server; your messages and media are never part of that.)
Why not do it all on my phone?
We tried it that way first. Rendering a long book in the browser took minutes, fell over on older phones, and produced pages that were pictures of text rather than text — soft in print, and not searchable. Doing it properly on our side means one book, one quality, whatever you're holding. The trade is that the finished pages pass through us for a few seconds, and we delete them straight after.
Do photos and voice notes make it into the book?
Yes — upload the .zip export (“Attach Media”) and photos, stickers and video stills are typeset onto the page. Voice notes get their real durations under a waveform, just like on your phone.
Does anyone read my chat?
No. Your book is typeset by software and printed by a machine, and nobody here opens it. The one exception is the Heirloom edition, which is hand-bound and prints exactly once — that one is proofread end to end by a single maker before it goes to press, because a mistake in it could never be corrected. That is the only tier where a human being sees a page, and you choose it deliberately.
Will my book be perfect?
We try very hard, and we won't pretend to certainty. WhatsApp exports vary — between phones, between versions, between languages — and some things simply aren't in the file: deleted messages, disappearing ones, anything sent as "view once". Elsewhere the guesswork is ours: which side of the page a photo belongs on, how a long voice note should sit. We'd rather you knew that before you print than after. Look through every page in the preview before you send it to a print shop — it is the same book, exactly as it will be printed.
Does it work for group chats?
Yes — group chats get sender names in their WhatsApp colours and profile-photo avatars beside each run of messages. You can build and preview the whole thing for free; exporting a group chat as a PDF is part of Print-ready files. Group books are longer, and the group layout — sender colours, avatars, the lot — is the part people ask for by name, so it sits on the paid side.
Export Chat isn’t in my WhatsApp menu.
Since 2025, WhatsApp lets the other person switch exporting off for a chat — it’s called Advanced Chat Privacy, and when it’s on, the Export Chat item disappears for everyone in that conversation. Nothing is wrong with your phone and nothing is wrong with Kept in Print. Ask them to turn it off in the chat’s settings, and the option comes back.
What do I do with the PDF?
It's a real print-ready file — every page is exactly A4, A5, A6 or 21 cm square. Any print shop can bind it same-day; most online photo-book services accept it too.
How long can the chat be?
Years. Big chats take a minute or two to render because every page is drawn at print resolution — a progress bar keeps you posted.
Is it free?
Yes — actually free, not trial-free. Sign in and make as many books as you want. Free books carry a faint "Made with Kept in Print" mark across each page and a small lockup on the cover — nothing is hidden or blurred, every word stays readable. Print-ready files (R349) removes it and adds the extras, and that's what pays for hosting. It is one payment per book — no subscriptions either way, because gifts shouldn't have those.
Can I give one of these to someone else?
Soon. Only someone inside a chat can export it, so nobody can buy a finished book of your sister's chats — but a "Give a book" voucher buys her the means: prepaid Print-ready files or a printed edition, delivered as a gold printable card that says "One book, on me." Vouchers stay valid for three years.