A friend of mine introduced me to Touchnote by sending me a postcard showing a beer can next to the ugliest, dead fish I’ve ever seen. Obviously I put it on my fridge to show it off. I then researched Touchnote a bit, tried it out over Christmas and here I am recommending it…(See below for pictures of the Christmas Card I sent a friend through Touchnote).

Download the app from App Store, buy credits and you’re good to go. The app is very intuitive and easy to use.  Any picture on your phone (taken by your phone or uploaded to it) can become your latest postcard. The Christmas cards they provided were folded and so twice the size of the “normal” cards, normally you get a standard size postcard in your mailbox, picture on one side and text on the other.

CREDITS

You buy credits in the app and you can chose to buy either 5, 10, 20, 40 or 100 at a time. The more you buy at a time, the cheaper each credit is (buy 5 credits they’re $1,99 each, buy 100 credits they’re $1,50 each).

PHOTOS

You press “start postcard” and choose a photo from the photos on your phone. Easy as pie. You have the option of adding a caption that will appear under the photo.

TEXT

Press “Next”, the “add message” and write whatever you like the recipient to receive. I’ve tried both normal text and quite rude cr*p, both found their way to their respective recipients without issue 😉

SEND

You add address, the phone already has your contacts so the app finds the address and fills this in when you choose a recipient (provided you’ve got the right address on your phone a loved one will receive their “analogue MMS” in a few days time). The app lets you add up to 50 recipients to the address book in the app. When you choose a recipient the app will tell you the approximate time of arrival or the card.
1 standard card = 1 credit (as of January 2017).

PROS: 
You can have specifically personal and unique postcards, anything you like that’s on your phone (there are probably SOME restrictions here, guys, tone down the wild stuff). I love that my own photos can become a postcard pretty much right after I take them. You can even choose a photo to personalize your stamp (doesn’t have to be the same as the photo in front).
In addition, and the best part in my opinion, you don’t have to find a post office, you send it “from your phone” (the company then sends the actual postcard from wherever they deem fit). This is a huge pro for me as I sometimes find it a hassle to procure the correct stamps and find a postbox/post office.

CONS:
You wont get the traditional location postcards with the name printed and maybe the photos will be a bit less professional. (The name-thing can easily be mended by other apps that edit your photos and add text).
Also, they wont be handwritten, for those of you who are very fond of this particular charm. Even though your message is personal, it will be in printed letters. And, for the stamp collectors out there, there wont be a local stamp on the envelope 😉

The envelope for the Christmas Cards, the standard cards don’t have envelopes. Name of recipient goes in front as usual and the name of sender in top, left corner. You can change this name (sender) in the app. The stamp show Touchnote-logo OR your own picture and where they sent the physical card from.

The Christmas Cards were folded and therefore bigger than the standard cards. I just wrote one word on this one, but there’s space for quite a lot on both the special and the standard cards. The cards are good quality too.

All in all I’m thrilled with this app. And I don’t have a huge travel blog that gets sponsored so you don’t have to worry about me getting paid to say this 😉