Tell me about it! I've used so many photo services (that then very reliably go out of business) that I wrote PhotoStructure to sweep my mess of disorganized and duplicated photos and videos into order and self-host them with a UI that's designed for discovery and fun browsing. <please-forgive-the-plug> https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ </please-forgive-the-plug>
I'm wondering what competition looks like in this market. My wife loves Snapfish and I'm thinking each album she creates and purchases in 2020 is going to be considerably more expensive.
It is quite interesting market to be as software developer and there is quite a lot of competition. I'm from Lithuania, small country of 3 million people, and we have multiple companies offering photo book printing.
The hard part in this business is handling successfully both printing and software development parts. If you offload any of the tasks to 3rd party you can't offer cheaper option than competition anymore. If you do both then you have more problems. I don't know everything about competition but let's have some fun:
* Snapfish - completely focused to West Countries (North America and West Europe). They will never be able to conquer other markets with current technology stack/solutions they have now. They can solve the problems they have but I'm not sure how capable they are to do that.
* Google - yes, Google, is in this market as well. They have small simple solution but I think they have offloaded printing to 3rd party and printing books in their side is very expensive. I think Google will never be big player in this market but photo books will never get more expensive than Google's offering.
* Canva - you can create photo books using canva as well. They have quite amazing (while not pixel perfect) software stack but they don't offer photo book printing. You can download PDF and print it in local print shop if you want to get it cheaper.
I don't know what's local situation in USA but if you are in Europe you might consider printing somewhere in East Europe - most probably you will get lower price and good quality.
We make shutterfly books after every vacation. We now have about 50 of them. The kids love looking through them (though this does cause some issues with the younger kids that weren't around when we went on some vacations with the older kids - we are having to repeat some vacations again because of it). I hope this doesn't affect this part of the shutterfly business.
I work for a fortune 100 company that gives us so much vacation time which rolls over from year to year (up to a cap of about 400 hours) that right now I could take off about 7 weeks of vacation. Plus we have every Friday from memorial day to labor day off (paid). And we get a sabbatical every 5 years. The biggest problem I have with vacation time it taking off enough to stay under the cap.
