The Flower Letters, Letters From Afar and Wild Bird Post: An Honest Comparison

Comparison posts are usually written by whoever wins them. This one will not be, because a fair reader deserves the version where we lose sometimes too. There are three kinds of letter here: a serialised romance, a travelogue, and a bird letter, and if you are only ever going to subscribe to one, you should know exactly what each is actually good at before you choose.

The three letters, in short

The Flower Letters tells a continuing love story in two letters a month, arriving with postcards, faux telegrams, newspaper clippings and stickers folded in, priced around $13 a month whether you pay monthly or upfront for the year. Letters From Afar sends one illustrated letter a month from a different place in the world, with field notes and a map, priced somewhere around $7 to $9 a month depending on the plan, less again on six or twelve month terms. Wild Bird Post sends one letter a month about one bird or one turning of the season, with a fine-art print folded in, from €10 a month, about $11, postage included wherever it is going.

Same format, three different reasons to open the envelope.

Where The Flower Letters wins

If what you actually want is plot, a reason to keep subscribing to find out what happens next, The Flower Letters is built for exactly that in a way a nature letter never will be. Two letters a month instead of one means twice the mail, and an established run of past story arcs means a real back-catalogue to fall in love with before you even join. It is also simply a bigger tent: you do not need to care about birds, or anything in particular, to want to know how the story ends.

Where Letters From Afar wins

For a family, especially a homeschooling one, Letters From Afar solves a problem Wild Bird Post was never built to solve: geography made tangible for kids, one country at a time, with maps and field notes doing quiet curriculum work. Its entry price is lower than ours, too, which matters if you are subscribing three kids at once rather than one adult.

Where Wild Bird Post wins

Birds, specifically, and depth over breadth. Neither rival writes about birds at all, so if the reader you have in mind already knows a nuthatch from a chickadee, neither one has much for her. Every tier here also includes postage as one flat price, wherever in the world the letter is going. The Flower Letters calculates international shipping at checkout and warns that the first parcel can carry customs fees; Letters From Afar charges international subscribers extra per stamp. Ours is the same €10, €15 or €25 whether the envelope is going to Ohio or Auckland. And unlike either rival, a complete sample letter, print included, is free to read before you spend a cent.

Where Wild Bird Post loses, honestly

Here is the ledger the other way. Both rivals have been mailing letters for a while and can point to a real shelf of past issues; we cannot, yet. Both are shipping subscriptions today; Wild Bird Post is not. Right now there is a free waitlist, not a live subscription, and paid letters do not start posting until autumn 2026. If you want mail in your box next week, we are not the answer this month. And we only ever write about one subject. If birds are not the reader’s thing, nothing about the print or the paper stock will change that. This is the narrowest of the three letters by design, not the broadest.

Who should actually choose which

Choose The Flower Letters for the story, if what you want is a serial that does not need to be about anything real. Choose Letters From Afar for a curious kid and a wall map. Choose Wild Bird Post for the reader who already has three feeders up and refills them before her own coffee, because a monthly letter about birds, written like this, does not really exist anywhere else yet. If you came here looking for a Flower Letters alternative built around something true instead of a serial, birds are about as true as it gets.

We covered what each club actually costs across the whole category elsewhere. Here, the only thing left to decide is which envelope you would actually wait for. If it is ours, join the waitlist and Letter No. 0 is yours free today, ahead of anything else.