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No — and this is built into how the site works, not just a promise. Your book is fully generated before the payment button appears. If it can't be built you'll see an error instead of a price, and you won't be able to pay. When you do see "Your book is ready: N pages", that file already exists on your device; paying unlocks the download of that exact file.

Yes, three ways: the live preview on the create page shows your real conversation laid out; you can download a free watermarked PDF of the first pages; and there are complete sample books made from fictional conversations.

One print-ready PDF of one conversation — the whole thing, no message limit, with a cover page, date headers, page numbers, and a table of contents for longer chats. Photos are included on the Mac and iPhone-backup methods. It's a one-time payment: no account, no subscription, nothing to cancel.

This means the picture wasn't in the data you gave us. On the Mac method, photos live in a separate folder — go back a step and also add ~/Library/Messages/Attachments. On the iPhone backup method, photos come through automatically, but only if the backup was encrypted(unencrypted backups leave Messages attachments out). On the copy & paste method photos can never be included — that's a limitation of copying text, and the book marks where each photo was.

The password is the one you set for "Encrypt local backup" in Finder or iTunes — not your iPhone passcode and not your Apple ID password. If you've forgotten it, the fastest fix is to turn off encrypted backups, turn them back on with a new password, and make a fresh backup. (Apple can't recover the old one.)

Make sure you picked chat.db itself, not chat.db-wal or chat.db-shm. Quit Messages before copying it. If Finder won't let you into ~/Library/Messages, grant Finder Full Disk Access in System Settings → Privacy & Security, or copy it from Terminal with cp ~/Library/Messages/chat.db ~/Desktop/.

Copy-paste exports vary a lot. The parser does best when each line looks like Name: message with date lines in between. Type your own name into the "your name in the chat" box so your messages get blue bubbles. If dates are missing from what you pasted, the book simply won't show date separators — the messages are still all there in order.

Very long conversations (tens of thousands of messages, or lots of photos) take a while because everything is generated on your own device. There's a progress bar — leave the tab open and it will finish. If it's been more than a few minutes, try again in a different browser, or split the conversation into a shorter date range.

Emoji are included as images and should appear normally. Non-Latin alphabets (Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew and similar) aren't supported by the PDF fonts yet and get dropped — if your conversation is mostly in one of those, this tool isn't ready for you and you shouldn't pay for it. Email us and we'll tell you when it is.

Press Download your book again — you can re-download as many times as you like while the tab is open, and your browser may have blocked the first attempt. Check your downloads folder before assuming it failed. If you close the tab before saving the file, email us with your Stripe receipt and we'll sort it out.

Yes. Because the book is built and shown to you before you pay, refunds should be rare — but if the file is genuinely unusable, email us with your Stripe receipt and a description of what's wrong and we'll refund you. Please tell us what went wrong; it's usually something we can fix.

The PDF is standard US Letter. A local copy shop can print and bind it (spiral or hardcover) — that's usually the nicest gift option. Print-on-demand services like Lulu and Blurb also accept PDFs. For home printing, use double-sided and the "actual size" / 100% scale setting.