Verified purchaser
Terrible interface. Not great results.
This app is not ready for prime time. I really wanted to LOVE this. I have been looking for a program like this for a while. Unfortunately, the interface is terrible, but I can live with that. I spent a ton of credits to upload pdfs into my account. That's fine. I love that you only need to do this once, and it was worth the credits. There was almost no guidance in doing this, however, so I mistakenly loaded several source into one upload which is now considered one source so that's now how I am forced to use it. Okay, user error plus crappy instructions--that's a learning curve. But I bought the tier 3 specifically to use BYOK. I have the highest version of chat. No where did I see that I also HAD to have Gemini (and a subscription to boot). So that after loading all of my sources then creating my instructions, I waited an entire day almost to be told that the program halted because I only had a free subscription to Gemini. So, more money down the drain, I bought. a subscription to Gemini to finish the book. The book is really poorly written and didn't seem to use the painstakingly tedious pdfs that I had uploaded much at all. It will take weeks to fix this. I might as well have written it myself. There also isn't much formatting, so to look like a book there is a ton to do.
Okay, maybe that was just this one. So, I tried again. This time after the same process, after over 12 hours I went back to find that my book was cancelled after I had gotten the message it was in the process of being created. There is absolutely no information about why, it just cancelled!! Well, that really sucks.
Customer service has been awful. I have tried to send a message each time to try and understand the app better and where I am going wrong and they have been no help at all. I told them in one message that I wasnt a techie and needed some guidance to why things were halted with no explanation, why the BYOK was giving me an issue and what to do, etc. and was told to drop down to tier 2 and use a10x the credits. WOW!! That really stinks as far as customer service goes.
Ioannis_Youbooks
Edited Oct 11, 2025Thank you your input. Your reviews does bring up some good points that customers should be aware of.
1) The interface has no functional issues but it could be better. Totally agree, we've put all the effort into the workflows. It's what sets Youbooks apart.
2) On "no guidance", there is an interactive introduction to each section, and detailed directions on the left side even after you click that away. The fact that each book can only use one source for now is in bold text. The solution here is to work on the update that will allow multiple sources per project - not tune the already heavy and in-your-face instructions (most people don't read them anyways).
3) BYOK customers are reasponsible for the keyes as in all SaaS apps. It appears you thought that you can use a free Gemini app key to generate a book. You can, but due to the rate limits, our workflow will pause and report the Gemini error back to you every few hours. Youbooks has an enterprise grade workflow that does not fail when your API keys fail - this is a goood thing (and a source of much of your frustration for the Gemini rate limit errors). It is your job to ensure that your keys have the necessary permissions, quotas, and meet rate limits. It is our job to ensure your project does not break even if your keys "misbehave" and that you are aware of any issues.
On the poorly written book, we run a ChatGPT Pro eval on your book and returned an average rating of 6. This is in line with what Youbooks can do right now. It is much higher than what other book generators achieve, in line with self-published non-fiction on KDP, and below large publisher non-fiction.
It also looks like you were frustrated that it did not include all your PDF knowledge in the book. Youbooks is not a content re-purposing tool. It will not restructure or re-organize your content into a cohesive book. I have said much about this already in many answers so I will not dive into it in detail here.
On the cancellation you experienced (which had no effect on delivery) - we were pushing some updates and a bug irevocably cancelled 4 workflows. We reset those and they ran again from beginning to completion. So, there was nothing for you to do except for wait a bit longer. This is the first time some workflows has to be reset due to a deployment bug in months, but stuff like this happens in an actively developing app.
On the customer service being awful - I really don't understand where you are coming from. We answered every quesiton you had in detail. It looks like you took it personally that we told you that it might be better to get two Tier 2 subscriptions for a total of 1M credits for cheaper. You said a few times that you were a non-techie yourself, so I thought that you should know that this is a valid option that other users went for. If you want quantity, and don't want to manage keys, you are better off with multiple Tier 2s rather than a Tier 4. It's not obvious, and many customers have thanked us for pointing that out to them and offering to combine accounts (we do make less money btw by doing this, but it's the honest thing to do).
A few points for other readers reading this [this is more general, not an answer to the review above]
=== Where are the bad reviews that compare Youbooks with other AI book generators? ===
Answer: Nowhere.
Reason: Because Youbooks does the best job right now in the market.
=== Why are some people complaining that the output is crap and others praise it? ===
Answer: Because some people have a spcific vision of what they want their book to be, and Youbooks cannot deliver that. Also, some people think that Youbooks can take their notes or content and make a book out of it. It cannot - it is not a content repurposing tool. Users that are more flexibe (mostly Publishers and Marketters, vs Authors) like the output because they care more about polish and commercial value, rather than expressing themselves.
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Funny story
The first review we ever got was on ProductHunt. It read more or less like this...
"Does not do fiction. Wasted opportunity" - 1 Star
I was pretty pissed off at this. We had just spent blood swet and tears to make the best non-fiction workflow on the market today, and there I was...
Youbooks will not write the book you had sitting on your head for lifetime. We have made something that is twice as good at doing ONE THING, than the next best competitor in line. Not a single negative review compares us against that, but rather, they compare us to what we ought to be (fiction, re-purposing, academic, image based textbooks, etc.).
This is, by itself, quite telling.