Free photo printing or actually get paid to print your photos

At the end of yesterday’s bargains post, I mentioned filling our new 30 clip frames with free photo prints.

I’m not a fan of printed-at-home photos as even with the best desktop printers, the quality is usually poor and the ink is so expensive too so we look to professional printers whenever we want some pictures printed out.

The other day John discovered that we qualify for 50 free photos a month as part of our Broadband subscription. It sounds like the offer is only for a year but that’s 600 photos in total so not to be sniffed at.

Free is, of course, good but actually getting paid to print your photos is even better: I got paid £3.49 and 50 free prints from Photobox earlier in the summer.

Photobox gives all new customers 50 free 6×4 prints, you just have to pay postage and packing of £1.49. When I signed up though, they were also giving away £5 for every new signup through TopCashBack – so even after p&p costs, I was in profit.

There are a number of cashback sites – sites that give you money whenever you use/buy things through certain sites – but I use TopCashBack. It was recommended through MoneySavingExpert as a good one to use because it doesn’t have any annual fee and gives you 100% of the cashback they receive. The amount of money is usually a percentage of your spend – for example, by something for £20 with a 10% cashback rate and you get £2 back, all nice and straightforward – but sometimes it’s a fixed amount – for example, energy suppliers pay handsomely (up to £140 for dual fuel) if you switch to them, or a photo printing service will give a fixed amount for new customers signing up. Most companies have pretty static cashback arrangements but others use them for promotion – temporarily upping the percentage cashback or offering a larger fixed sum. Since I don’t buy that much on or offline, I don’t earn that much cashback by shopping but it’s useful for some necessary things – for example, insurance or utilities.

Anyway, Photobox have changed the terms of their cashback now so it’s not as profitable with them. At the time of writing this, you can get the free prints and £1 back – so after p&p, you’ll essentially get 50 prints for 49p; or if you spend £3 on, say, a few larger prints, you get £6.50 back (plus the 50 free 6x4s), I think the p&p will be slightly more though. (You also get 17% cashback on repeat purchases.) The photos arrived really quickly, are good quality (I’m sure an expert would be able to pick up flaws but they’re fine for us) and the cashback tracked instantly.

Their competitor Snapfish is offering a similar deal to the original Photobox one: 40 free prints and £5 back. I haven’t used them yet – I will do now we’ve got all these photo frames! – so I can’t comment on quality and I’m not sure how much their p&p is (I think I looked into it a few weeks ago and found it to be comparable to Photobox though).

There are several other photo printing services offering percentage cashbacks or very small fixed amounts for leads but Snapfish & Photobox seem to be the best at the moment – well worth keeping an eye on the others though in case they join in the money giveaway promotion malarky.

Disclaimer: if you sign up for TopCashBack using the links I’ve provided, I’ll get a referral bonus. That’s not why I’ve written this post though – I think the cashback deals stand for themselves and would have written it referral bonus or not. Having said that though, if you are going to sign up, do follow one of those links ;)

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