Hamsterra vs Booksprout

100 readers per campaign, 100 invitation emails in any 30 days, 500 MiB of files, 1 pen name. No time limit.

Free account for setup: books, pen names, teams and followers. Starting a review campaign or collecting new claims needs a paid plan.

No trial: the Free plan has no end date.

The pricing FAQ says there is no free trial. A 30-day money-back guarantee applies to paid plans.

Subscription: Stash €8 a month before VAT (UK consumers: €9.60 including 20% VAT), Hoard €15 a month before VAT (UK consumers: €18 including 20% VAT). No per-book or per-reader fees.

Subscription per account: $9, $19, $29 or $59 a month by plan, or yearly. No per-book or per-reader fees listed.

Open sign-up after email verification. No book approval before publishing.

Open sign-up; payment can be skipped. The full book is required, and no ISBN rule is stated.

Invitations to readers who opted in on Hamsterra, counted against the invitation limit. No import of an existing contact list.

Review teams joined by invite link or pre-listed emails. Copies go out through campaigns on a paid plan, within its copies-per-campaign cap.

Published campaigns appear in the public ARC catalogue while eligible for listing. No paid promotion.

Public campaigns appear in the reviewer catalogue on all paid plans. According to booksprout.co, over 80,000 active reviewers.

No private, link-only or invite-only campaign setting.

A campaign can be open to anyone with its private link, or to team members only.

The author approves or declines each application, manually or automatically, with an optional form.

Readers claim copies within campaign settings. Books from teams they belong to do not count towards their personal claim limit; other claims have weekly rank-based caps. Authors accept team applicants; per-claim approval is not publicly confirmed.

Contacts with consent history and tags; CSV export of eligible contacts who opted into the author’s reader list; blocked readers. No contact import or notes.

The free account supports team setup and management of existing reviewers. Teams have statuses and blocking, and reviewer profiles show history, but free access to every operation is not confirmed. Tags, notes and export are not publicly confirmed.

EPUB and PDF download. No browser reading, no Send to Kindle, no audiobooks.

EPUB or PDF download, a copy by email, web and app reader. For Kindle the reader forwards that email by hand (help article of 21 November 2022).

Readers add up to 10 review links; reminder rules. Self-reported, not checked on review sites.

Readers paste store review links as proof; the author sets the required stores, with automatic reminders. Links are self-reported.

Up to 5,000 characters with any result.

An optional private feedback field in the review form, plus a reason when a reader withdraws.

1 open magnet on Free; 5 or 20 on paid plans.

No magnet or newsletter opt-in feature found; the author rules forbid adding team members to a newsletter.

5 giveaways at a time on Free; on paid plans the limit follows the giveaway rating.

No multi-author promo or giveaway feature found on the checked pages.

Each campaign copy shows the reader’s name and a Copy ID; a free-book copy shows the reader’s email. Not DRM.

According to Booksprout, each downloaded book is “tagged”, and authors can report a found copy. Whether the mark is visible or shows reader details is not stated.

Last 30 days on Free; 12 months, sources and CSV export on paid plans.

The campaign page shows participants, claimed copies, email alerts sent and reviews with filters. Views and report export are not publicly confirmed.