Shutterfly vs Skoma

Shutterfly is the mass-market default. It is inexpensive, everywhere, and often running a promotion. If you want the cheapest possible general photo book, it’s hard to beat on base price.

Skoma makes a different trade. Instead of a low headline price with per-page fees and add-ons, it’s one flat price with free worldwide shipping. And instead of a blank general template, it hands you your whole season already laid out from your Strava data.

How they compare

How to compare the two prices

Compare checkout totals, not headline prices. Decide how many pages you need first, then price that exact book in both places, with shipping, on the day you order.

For Skoma the sum is short. In the US, 50 pages cost $49.99. A 70-page book costs $69.79, because each page past 50 adds $0.99. Shipping is included worldwide, and the price doesn’t change with promotions.

For Shutterfly the total depends on the size, the cover, the number of extra pages and whichever offer is running. A sale can bring it well below Skoma. Without one, the gap is smaller than the base price suggests.

Time to a finished book

A Shutterfly book starts from a template. You upload photos, arrange them and add captions. Distances, paces and splits have to be typed in by hand.

A Skoma book starts as a draft. The calendar, weekly distances, the race map and race-day stats come from Strava. Your time goes into choosing photos and writing captions, not copying numbers.

For a book of one race season, that is often the difference between finishing it in an evening and leaving it half-done for a month.

What Shutterfly is better at

Low prices during a sale. A wide range of other products, from prints to cards and gifts. And general books with no training data at all, such as a family holiday or a year of the kids.

Skoma’s range is narrow by comparison. Everything it prints starts from your runs and races.

What is in the Skoma draft

A cover and a title page. A training overview with a heatmap of every run and the block’s totals. For each month, a calendar of your runs, the weekly average distance and a page of that month’s photos. For the race, the course on a map, your finish time and your splits. A photo gallery closes the book.

All of it is editable. Pages can be deleted, reordered or rebuilt from a layout. A theme restyles the whole book at once.

Before you order from either

Flip through every page at full size. Look for photos that came out blurry when enlarged. Phone pictures from a dark race morning often do.

Check the page count against the price. On Skoma every page past 50 is charged. On Shutterfly extra pages are charged too.

Check names and dates. Neither service will catch a typo in a caption.

And share it first. Skoma gives you a private, read-only link, so a training partner can spot what you missed.

Where Skoma falls short

Hardcover only, in three shapes. Fewer price drops to wait for. And no use at all for a book without training in it.

Making the book for someone else

Plenty of these books are gifts. With Shutterfly you can make one from photos you already have, without the runner knowing. That is a real advantage for a surprise.

A Skoma book needs the runner’s training data, which usually means their Strava account. For a surprise, that is awkward. A Skoma gift card gets round it: they redeem it and build the book from their own season, and you don’t need their login.

If you have their GPX files from a shared race, you can also upload those yourself.

Which should you choose?

Details reflect each provider’s publicly available information and may change; brand names are trademarks of their respective owners.