Most family history subscriptions cost more per month than Storied costs per year. That's the whole pitch, and it holds up better than you'd expect. Storied launched in January 2023 out of Provo, Utah, built on the newspaper and record archives of a company called World Archives, which Charles Thayne Capital bought in 2020 and renamed. Kendall Hulet runs it, and he spent fourteen years at Ancestry before he took the CEO job. We've reviewed the AI at Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, and Goldie May in this series. Storied is the first one where the AI isn't the interesting part. The price is, and so is what the price leaves out.
What Storied actually is.
Three things in one subscription: a family tree, a search across historical records and newspapers, and somewhere to write and share stories. Start a tree from nothing or upload a GEDCOM. The free account covers the tree, your stories, photos, and sharing with family, and records are the paid part. What separates it from Ancestry sits underneath, in the graph. Storied lets you attach people who aren't relatives. The schoolteacher. The neighbor. The woman who ran the boarding house. On a conventional tree those people have nowhere to go, and a great deal of a life happens among them. Latter-day Saint FamilySearch users get a Storied account free under a partnership announced in November 2024, so plenty of the people you'll meet using it never chose it on price at all.
The newspapers are the inheritance.
World Archives sold newspaper content for years before the rebrand, and that collection is still the best reason to pay. Storied says its newspapers run back to 1607. At RootsTech in March 2026, chief operating officer Laryn Brown said the archive behind Storied has transcribed and made searchable three billion articles and identified 500 million people in them. Those are vendor numbers, not audited ones, so read them as a measure of scale. They are not a promise about your county. What matters at the desk is that obituaries, marriage notices, and small-town social columns name relationships no census ever recorded. One obituary naming a surviving sister in Ohio can end a year of guessing.
What it costs, and where the cheap tier stops.
The pricing page lists three annual plans: Essential at $19.99 a year, Plus at $49.99, and Ultimate at $99.99, each with a seven-day trial. Read the comparison table before you pick one. Essential covers US and Canada records from 1925 to the present and gives you five newspaper views, and most genealogy happens well before 1925. Plus opens all US and Canada records but caps newspapers at 1960 and later, which is the wrong end of a newspaper archive if you're chasing a great-grandmother's obituary. Ultimate is the tier that matches the advertising: international records, worldwide newspapers. At $99.99 a year that's still cheap next to the field. It's also five times the headline price. Monthly billing exists too, and the rate you're quoted moves depending on where you sign up, so trust the number on the checkout screen over the number in the ad.
StoryAssist, and the book at the end of it.
StoryAssist is the AI. Feed it what you know about a person and it drafts a narrative you then correct. Storied announced it in March 2023 and billed it as the first AI story generator in family history. It drafts; it doesn't research. That line matters, because a fluent paragraph about an ancestor is cheap to produce and expensive to check. The printed end of the product is StoriedBook: hardcover, six by nine inches, up to 200 color pages at no extra charge, with a QR code beside each story that opens the digital version and as many as a hundred attached photos, clippings, and audio files. A Creator subscription includes your first book plus a year of the studio. Extra books run $79.99 and extra copies of the same book $49.99, printing takes four to six weeks, and Storied doesn't ship internationally.
Where it thins out.
Three gaps to know about. First, there's no DNA product: no test to buy, no match list, and no DNA row on the plan comparison. Second, record search sits behind a sign-in, so you can't look at what's in the collection before you create an account, and there's no browsable catalog of the sort FamilySearch and Ancestry publish. Third, the app store ratings split in a way worth reading. Apple's store shows 4.8 stars from 113 ratings; Google Play shows 4.1 from 218 reviews, and the one-star reviews there cluster on login failures, trial charges the reviewer says nobody reversed, and slow support. Every subscription collects complaints like that. Read a few before you hand over a card.
The honest scorecard.
Strengths: the price is real, not a teaser, and at the top tier the newspaper depth is the thing you're actually buying. The non-relative graph is a genuinely different idea, and Storied is the only site in this series that treats a godmother as a full citizen of the tree. StoriedBook is the cheapest sensible route we've found from a tree to a hardcover on a shelf. Weaknesses: the tier lines are drawn at exactly the dates researchers care about, so the advertised price and the useful price sit far apart. The record collection is smaller than Ancestry's and you can't inspect it before subscribing. Support is the weakest part of the public record.
Who it's for.
Storied fits two people. The researcher who wants newspaper coverage and won't pay Ancestry money for it, and the family organizer who needs somewhere to keep photos, voices, and the stories that never fit in a chart. If you're Latter-day Saint and already on FamilySearch, the account is free and the question answers itself. It's a poor fit if you need DNA, if your research lives in a country its collections don't reach, or if you want a documented way to take your tree somewhere else later.
Where AncestorIQ fits.
Storied and AncestorIQ split the work differently. Storied sells you access to a records collection and you do the searching. AncestorIQ's Deep Research runs the search itself: name an ancestor, and it works across sources and hands back findings with citations you confirm before anything touches your tree. If you already pay Storied for newspapers, the two stack rather than compete. If you're still shopping, our Ancestry alternatives comparison covers the paid field, and the best AI genealogy tools comparison ranks the AI. And if there's a GEDCOM sitting on your drive right now, you can open it in our free GEDCOM viewer without signing up for anything.
