that's why i purchased the full version - well, was given it as a present and paid for the later version update. if you have the full version, you can do everything you want, can use templates or do your own layouts (i do a mix of both) and then instead of sending to them, you can "save pages as" - then transfer those to cheaper printing options. i have printed using the 8*8 books at snapfish and BigW (so very cheap) - they're not bad quality, but i'm going to redo them through CM or momento for the archival quality prints.
as gifts though, the cheaper ones are all i do. the program has paid for itself well and truly already. i've used it to do invites, christmas cards, thankyou cards (printed through bigw), photo books for gifts, created fantasy scenes for Zarava Flutterby. it's a very simple program to use really. and you can get a lot of basic stuff from the CM website to work from

having said that, it isn't a "manipulation" program. you can do very basic stuff, but it doesn't allow you to cut people out or anything like that. i use GIMP (which is a freebie on the net) for stuff like that