Flag Disrupts the Photo Printing by Offering Free Prints

Successfully funded on Kickstarter just less than 24 hours ago is Flag, a mobile app that prints your digital photos and mails them to you or your friends and family for free. How's that possible, you ask? Flag covers its costs and makes money by placing an ad on the back of every print. The team promises that ads “will always be tasteful” and that advertisers will be encouraged to make them inspiring. If you don't want ads on the back of your photos, you can order ad-free prints for a small fee. To order prints, simply select 20 photos and tap “print” in the app. Flag will then print them using museum-quality printers on German 220 gram photo paper from sustainable resources and mail them to you or a loved one. Shipping within the US is free, but international shipping is not.

Flag makes it easy to customize your prints, using laser-cutters to create rounded corners, scallops, and borderless prints. The service also lets you “jumboize” your images – this option cuts a big print into smaller sizes, which you then can assemble into a poster-size print. In addition, you can turn any photo into a postcard with Flag. Just pick an image, type or handwrite a note, and tell Flag where to send it.

Flag was founded by Samuel Agboola, who came up with the idea for the service after he manually cut sheets of printed paper into 10,000 baseball card size rectangles for his wedding. He wondered why taking photos has never been easier and cheaper but printing them has remained expensive and difficult to do. Agboola likens Flag to “the difference between the effort involved in taking your car to the garage and getting your oil changed, compared with leaving your car in the driveway, and having someone come and do it for you.”

Flag has been featured in Cult of Mac, Gizmodo, CNET Australia, TechCrunch, Yahoo!, NBC News, Pando Daily, and more.