When you think about cloth diapering on a budget, I guarantee you probably go straight to thinking about prefolds and diaper covers. It's the most economical choice {unless you have expensive tastes for say, super fine cashmere wool covers} when it comes to using cloth diapers – or any diapers for that matter.

It is pretty amazing that realistically, you could cloth diapers a child for right at $100 for the entire time they are in cloth. Sure – we can argue it up both sides and down – you might want smaller prefolds when they're younger, etc, but it can be done and probably for less than $100 if you really tried.

I'm no expert on prefolds or flats. I used them very little with both of my girls. They were probably my favorite way to cloth diaper in the first few weeks of Sophia and Moreaya's life because they were cheap and easy. I simply tri-folded a prefold and laid it in a cover. I even used a snappi a few times on Moreaya with a cover. The reason – they were cheap. When I was changing so many Reusable Diaper everyday and most of our OS diapers were too big, I didn't want to invest in newborn pockets or AIOs just for a few weeks.

A prefold and cover was actually Sophia's first cloth diaper that she ever wore… at 3 weeks old.

Another great thing about using prefolds and covers is the fact that anything can become a prefold. When we talked about Pocket diaper really cheap, I shared that covers have been stuffed with numerous items – old t-shirts, receiving blankets, towels… Think about it. There weren't PUL covers back in the day – people used what they had.