Answer first: Lovevery is genuinely well made, and if you want someone to curate stage-by-stage toys so you never have to think about it, the subscription can be worth it, especially for a first baby. But you are paying a real premium for that curation, and most of the developmental bases are covered by a handful of simple, open-ended toys you can buy once and reuse for years. If money is no object or decision fatigue is your enemy, Lovevery is a fine yes. If you want the same results for less, you have options.
Let me say the fair thing first, because the internet loves to either worship Lovevery or dunk on it, and neither is honest. The kits are beautiful. The materials are high quality. The play items are genuinely age-appropriate and thoughtfully designed, and they arrive right when your baby is ready for them, which removes a real mental load. That is a legit product. The question is not whether it is good. It is whether it is worth it for you. And I can say all of this from experience, because I did the subscription thing myself, with my first.
What Lovevery actually does well
- Curation and timing. The biggest thing you are buying is not the toys, it is the not-having-to-decide. Each kit shows up matched to your baby's stage, so you skip the research rabbit hole. For an exhausted first-time parent, that is worth something real.
- Quality and aesthetics. Solid wood, organic cotton, non-toxic finishes, a look that does not clash with your house. No light-up plastic.
- The play guides. The little booklets that explain what a toy is for and how to use it are genuinely helpful if you like knowing the why.
Where the cost adds up
Here is the honest other side, and where my own experience kicked in. The subscription runs into real money over a baby's first couple of years, and you do not get to choose which items you receive. What I ended up with was a pile: some pieces my son genuinely loved, and a lot he glanced at once and ignored, all paid for at full price because I did not get to pick them. That is the part that adds up:
- You pay for pieces your kid ignores. Every baby is different. One of the most-hyped pieces is the object permanence box (ball goes in, rolls out the tray), and plenty of babies are mesmerized by it. Mine dropped the ball in exactly once, decided it was obvious, and went back to untying every shoelace in the house. Not a bad toy, just not his, and the miss still cost full price.
- You are partly paying for packaging and curation, not just the toys. That is the premium. Nothing wrong with paying it on purpose, but it helps to know that is what it is. I still remember reading the little cards that explained how to use each toy, then throwing them straight in the recycling and feeling weirdly wasteful about the whole thing.
- A lot of it duplicates the classics. An object permanence box, a set of stacking rings, a ball drop, simple wooden pieces. These are not Lovevery inventions. You can buy each one on its own, often for a fraction of the kit price.
Who should just buy it
Lovevery is a genuinely good yes if it is your first baby and you are drowning in choices, if you value curation over saving money, if you would otherwise buy a pile of random toys anyway (in which case the curated version is probably better and not much pricier), or if it is a generous gift someone else is giving. No shame in any of that. Sometimes paying for less decision-making is the smart parenting move.
How to get the same thing for less
If your goal is the developmental substance without the subscription, you can cover the same bases with a short list of open-ended basics and reuse them across kids. The trick is to buy for what your baby is actually doing at each stage (reaching, then grasping, then putting-in-and-taking-out, then stacking), not to buy a themed kit.
For the newborn window, the thing that fits is bold contrast, because that is what a new baby can actually see. Our High Contrast Newborn Set covers that first stage for about the price of a single add-on item, and it is the same idea Lovevery's earliest kit is built around. Then, for the long open-ended stretch from baby through preschool, a good set of blocks does more heavy lifting than any single kit. Our Wooden Rainbow Building Blocks get used as a stacker, a road, a sorting set, and eventually pretend groceries, across years rather than months. Two well-chosen purchases cover a huge share of what the kits deliver.
For the specific stage-by-stage swaps (the exact object permanence box, the stacker, the cheap classics that match each kit), we lined them up in Lovevery dupes, the cheaper toys that do the same job.
Honestly, this is kind of why Quiggly exists
Here is the part I will just be straight about, because it is the reason I am even the person writing this. The toys really are beautiful. That is not a backhanded compliment, it is the thing that stuck with me. Out of that whole expensive pile, there was one classic, open-ended piece I knew my son would actually love, and I kept thinking, why is this good thing buried inside a subscription. That is genuinely why I started Quiggly: to pull the one product worth keeping out of the mix and just do it right, so you can buy the good thing once instead of renting a rotation of hits and misses. So no, I am not anti-Lovevery. I am just pro-buying-the-keeper-on-its-own.
The honest bottom line
Lovevery is not a scam and it is not magic. It is a well-made convenience product with a premium attached to the convenience. If the curation genuinely saves your sanity, buy it and enjoy it. If you would rather spend a fraction of the money on a few open-ended basics and skip the pieces your kid would ignore anyway, you are not missing out on some secret developmental edge. The toys that matter most at this age are simple, and simple is cheap.
Still weighing the bigger question of whether pricey developmental toys are worth it at all? We get into it in are Montessori toys worth it, and lay out the genuinely-worth-it short list in what is actually worth it in the first year.