StoryWorth vs Remento vs Ethos: a pile of stories, or a real memoir?

All three sell a “life story book”. None of them mean the same thing by it.

Two of them collect answers. One writes a book.

StoryWorth and Remento send a question and print what comes back. We interview him and write a biography out of it. Everything below is that one difference, in detail.

Do you want a collection of stories, or a book that reads like a biography?

Here is the part nobody tells you before you pay. You are not choosing between three versions of the same book. Two of them make one thing, we make another, and most people do not find out which one they bought until the box arrives.

StoryWorth and Remento send a prompt. An answer comes back. That answer becomes an entry. Do it fifty times and you have fifty entries, printed in the order they arrived. Each one can be lovely. Remento will generate one follow up from a recording, which is more than StoryWorth does, but next week still opens a prompt off the list. What is missing in both is the thread that runs the whole way through.

A year later a hardcover arrives, you open it expecting his life, and it is fifty answers to fifty questions. Nothing is wrong with any page. It is just not the book you pictured. And he has answered the big questions once now, so most families never get him to sit down and do it again. Not every family has a spare year.

The people who tested both call it a scrapbook

Both are well reviewed, and that is not a contradiction. If you have never seen the alternative, a book of your father's stories is a lovely thing to open. The writers below had seen the alternative.

Which one is right for your parent?

1. Will they write, or will they talk? This is the one that decides it. Most of these books fail because the person you bought it for opens a blank page and closes it again. If your mother writes letters and keeps a journal, StoryWorth was built for her. If your father tells the same six stories every Sunday and has never typed a paragraph, pick one of the two that record him talking.

2. A pile of stories, or one book? If you want his answers kept the way he gave them, one at a time, StoryWorth and Remento both do that and Remento does it beautifully. If you want a memoir with a thread running through it, that is us.

3. Just him, or the whole family? If the book should be his answers only, any of the three will do. We and StoryWorth both let the family in. Theirs join his call. Ours each get an interview of their own, up to 50 of them, and their memories go in his book.

4. Do you want to hear his voice from the page? If the magic for your family is pointing a phone at the page and hearing him, that is Remento. With us you keep every recording and can download it, there is just no QR code printed in the chapter.

5. One payment, or every year? A yearly plan is fine if you want to keep collecting stories year after year. If you want one payment, one book and no renewal notice next spring, that is the one thing we do that neither of the others does.

A good book is good questions, asked at the right time

A list cannot listen. Ask anyone what their childhood home was like and you get a paragraph about a house. A biographer reads that answer, notices the brother who got mentioned once and never again, and comes back to him later. Ask in week one and you get a name. Ask in week six and you get the truth.

StoryWorth's Magic Interviews do follow up, on the $199 plan only, with 60 minutes for the whole year. The call cannot be booked ahead either. We tested it in August 2026. Someone opens the site, types a phone number, and it rings straight away. For a daughter three time zones away, arranging that is the whole job again.

How StoryWorth works

A question arrives by email once a week and she types the answer. After a year it becomes a hardcover. There are three plans: $59, $109 and $199 a year. The $59 prints black and white up to 480 pages. The $109 prints color up to 300, and $20 more at printing takes it to 480. The $199 adds guided phone interviews and renews at $99.

What it is good at

She can do the whole thing on a landline. Story Calls and Family Calls let her talk down the phone and it comes back word for word, though StoryWorth do not publish which plan those need. StoryWorth also does not rewrite what she typed, so the page is literally her sentences, commas and all. We edit the grammar and the order so it reads as a book. If you want her words untouched, they are closer to it than we are.

Where it gets hard

The talking is an addition to a writing product, not what it was built around. The weekly email still asks for a typed answer, and the interview that follows up on what she said is the $199 plan.

On the $59 plan nothing follows up. It is a list worked through in order, so you get fifty good answers to fifty unrelated questions, and the thread she mentioned in week three never gets pulled.

A weekly question is also homework, and homework is what people quietly stop doing around week five. Klein found that photos get pushed to the end of a story.

That is the short version. We paid for a StoryWorth account and went through it screen by screen, including what each of the three plans actually turns on: StoryWorth review.

How Remento works

A question arrives by text. He taps the link, presses a green button and talks. Remento writes it up from the recording. The book is 8 by 10 in full color on photo paper, and every chapter has a QR code that plays what he said. It is $99 a year, or $12 a month, for one book up to 200 pages. Past 200 it is $30 more. Extra copies are $69, a PDF is $49.99, and each extra storyteller is another $99.

What it is good at

The QR codes do something paper cannot. Pointing your phone at a little square and hearing him say it beats reading it. It is also the biggest book of the three and the best one for photos.

Where it gets hard

Nothing in the next prompt knows what he just said. He answers, it is written up on its own, and the next prompt arrives cold. Nobody checks what the computer heard either, so a misheard name prints that way. We have no human pass either, and what we do instead is hand you a list of every name to check. Klein also rewrote her story, asked for help, and got the original back with her changes ignored.

We paid for Remento as well. Every price, the book that turned up, and five things it does better than we do are here: Remento review.

How Ethos works, and what it costs

$99, once. A question arrives each week and they answer it out loud. We listen, and every question after that is built from what they said.

A good question is the whole thing

Remento gives him a prompt off a curated list the family picks from, and up to thirty minutes to answer it. After he records, their help centre says Remento generates one follow up question from what he just said. So there is a thread, and it is one link long. Next week opens another prompt off the list.

Ours are written from what he already told us, so one story opens the next and he keeps going without being asked to. There is no minimum, no timer and no target. He stops when he is done, and it averages 50 minutes.

They finish sooner

StoryWorth and Remento both sell a year. Most Ethos families are done in two to three months, at one question a week. The hardcover ships about a week later.

The book reads as a book

The answers are written into one story, not printed as fifty entries. Nobody here reads the finished book, so every name and place we heard comes back to you as one list to check before it prints.

7 by 10 hardcover, full color inside, thick coated paper. Most run 100 to 200 pages and it grows with the story up to 400, so a long life costs the same as a short one. That is more pages than either of them gives you without paying extra.

You do not have to take our word for any of this. You can read two finished books cover to cover on the Ethos life story book page.

The three books, drawn to scale

If StoryWorth is the one you came in already thinking about, the shorter page for that is StoryWorth alternatives, which weighs three replacements rather than arguing one case.

Memowrite comes up a lot alongside these two. We have written that one up separately, because unlike StoryWorth and Remento we have not used it, so it is compared purely on what they publish: Memowrite vs Ethos.

Where the other two beat us

Three places where we would tell a friend to buy something else.

1. Video. Remento has it, we do not.

We record the voice, not the face. If what you want is your grandmother on video, with her hands moving as she talks, Remento is the answer.

2. QR codes in the printed book.

Both of the others print them and Remento built its whole book around them. We keep every recording and you can download it, but hearing him means opening a file rather than pointing a phone at the page.

3. More pages for less money.

StoryWorth's $59 plan prints up to 480 pages, more than our 400, at the lowest yearly price of the three. If a very long book matters more to you than anything else, they win. Those 480 pages are black and white; in color they stop at 300.

What our own customers say

Every quote above this point is a writer reviewing somebody else's product. These are ours, pulled from the same list the rest of the site uses. We are rated 4.9 on Trustpilot, and we have left a four star one in.

What $99 gets you

Questions people ask us

P.S. If you only remember one line from all of this, make it this one. StoryWorth and Remento print his answers. We write his life. Both are worth having, and only one of them is what most people picture when they order a book about their father. The other two take a year to show you which one you bought.