How To Save Money on Cloth Diapers

Save $1000 per year

Save $1000 per year

I wrote a guest post for The Cloth Diaper Report a few months back, listing some ways I found to save mega bucks on cloth diapers. As you can see on my Cloth Diaper Basics page, cloth is nearly always A LOT cheaper than disposable diapers, but because I am just a teeny bit obsessive, I started to wonder if there were ways I could save EVEN MORE. I mean, cloth diapers are cute and all, but baby girl is still just pooping on them, right? Why pay more than you have to for a baby butt covering? :)

So here are a few ways you can save EVEN MORE on cloth diapers:

Blog Giveaways

Here is how I got $600 worth of cloth diapers and other baby gear for FREE!

There are hundreds of product review blogs out there, particularly for baby products and cloth diapers. All you have to do is:

  • Find product review blogs and subscribe, and then a steady stream of giveaway notifications will fill your mailbox. Usually all you have to do to enter a giveaway is leave a comment on the giveaway blog post. You may receive extra entries by doing things like subscribing, following the blog, etc. and leaving one comment per extra thing you do. Each blog has its own rules.
  • Check out sweepstake aggregators such as prizey.net to find a list of baby blog giveaways. These often include cloth diapers.
  • Look for weekly giveaways at blogs such as The Cloth Diaper Report, Cloth Diaper Blog, Family of the Cloth, and so on. The cool thing about mommy blogs is that they are oftened networked together via blogrolls, so you can find many more diaper giveaways by starting at one blog and clicking through its blogroll, then repeating that process at the next blog you visit. Also, a lot of these giveaway blogs give readers extra entries into their giveaways if they follow them on Google Friend Connect or Facebook’s Networked Blogs, so you can find even more giveaways by checking the subscription lists of a blog’s followers.
  • Search twitter for hashtags. Go to search.twitter.com and type in any combination of the following words: #cloth #diaper #giveaway. Then see what pops up. Giveaway entrants are also often given extra entries for tweeting about a contest, so you can find new blogs and new giveaways this way that you couldn’t otherwise find. There is something called Twitter Tuesday, when a number of blogs such as The Soft Landing give away products at a particular time on Twitter, and you need to be following them and keeping an eye out for their tweets that tell you what message to retweet to enter, so if you’re on Twitter and have the time, these can be quick and fun, too.

Promotions

Here is another thing to keep an eye out for on the mommy blogs:

  • Look for special promotions from eco-friendly online stores such as Sprout Baby and Franklin Goose. Recently, one of my mommy blogs alerted me that an eco-friendly online store was running a promotion in order to encourage users to review their products. They were offering $5 store credit for EVERY review you wrote of their products that you had tried, NO LIMIT. My husband commented, “Oh they’re going to regret that promotion, just because of you!” I noticed the promotion because I had just bought my baby girl a set of their alphabet blocks, but when I got to the site I realized they carried 38 baby products I had tried. You do the math, I’ll wait…. That’s right. $185 worth of baby products, TOTALLY FREE. Actually, it’s better than that. They ran the promotion for 10 days, so when I received half my order before that deadline, I went back and wrote reviews of the new products I had just tried, and got $20 more. Actually, I didn’t want any of my credit to go to waste, so I did spend $2.40. Do you want to know what I got for $2.40?
  1. 2 bags of Rockin’ Green cloth diaper detergent
  2. 2 sets of 2 Born Free pacifiers
  3. a Plan Toys wooden xylophone
  4. an Imagiplay fruit-cutting play food set
  5. a BumGenius hemp diaper doubler
  6. a KidCo popsicle making set
  7. 10 premium-size Green Earth prefold diapers
  8. a Green Toys chef set
  9. a Boon Odd Duck
  10. a Boon Water Bugs bath toy set
  11. Boon Benders feeding utensils
  12. a travel-size Baby Bjorn potty

Nuff said.

Sales

This one sounds obvious, but you might be surprised where you can find sales, really good sales, now that most cloth diaper stores are online. For instance, my local diaper shop, The Little Seedling, has pretty good prices on eco-friendly products, but they never have sale tags on anything. You have to know that they have:

  • a clearance bin in the back of the store, and a clearance bin on their website
  • a Facebook fan page with exclusive coupons and sale alerts for fans. Usually these are 15%-20% off any item(s), which is a pretty good discount to get with no effort.
  • a newsletter that sends subscribers exclusive coupons. You can’t double coupons, but you can usually use the FB coupons and newsletter coupons separately.

Suddenly, everything in the store is on sale at least once every month or two. Not bad, huh?

If you don’t have a store like The Little Seedling nearby, and the coupons offered aren’t enough to cover the cost of shipping, try checking out the Diaper Pin sales and announcements page, which aggregrates a number of online diaper shop sales in one place. Often, retailers are restricted in what discounts they can offer, so you will see a lot of stores offering the same sale at the same time. No sense in shopping around for sales if they’re all the same.

Seconds

Factory seconds are a good way to save more on new diapers: these diapers have cosmetic imperfections that don’t affect performance, and they can save you an extra 10-20%. You can find them:

Gently Used

If you’re open to this option, gently used diapers can save you a lot of money. You can find good deals at:

  • Websites such as Diaper Swappers, which allows cloth diapering mamas all around the country to swap their stashes. If you tried gDiapers and didn’t like them, you can sell them to someone else to try and recoup some of the cost. Sometimes you can do a straight trade with another user on these sites, or find a lot of diapers that a benevolent mama is willing to ship to you just for the cost of shipping.
  • Craigslist can be great for gently used anything. Look for postings that sell whole stashes of diapers in one lot, because these usually have the best prices. The diapers that have been treated the best by their owners also usually note what detergent they were washed in and if they have any stains. You could ask a seller about the detergent they used if you see a great price and want to know, but be prepared to WALK AWAY if they have been washing their diapers in Tide. Additives and softeners cause diapers to become waterproof… on the INSIDE. You don’t want to mess with that. Diapers can be stripped, which means washing them very thoroughly to get rid of any buildup, but it’s easiest to buy diapers that don’t require this.

Registries

If you’re thinking about cloth diapering while still pregnant, a great way to get cloth diapers is to register for them, but don’t make the mistake I did. I thought that my skeptical family and friends wouldn’t buy me diapers if I asked for too many or if they cost too much, so I registered for mostly one kind, only to discover they didn’t fit my baby girl very well. I strongly recommend that you try a variety of diapers to find what works for you (and your baby), and a registry is a great way to do that. If you don’t have a local diaper shop, consider registering with a diaper boutique online that allows you to buy your unpurchased registry items after your shower at a discount. 10% off equals instant diaper sale.