I have a 9 year old, 7 year old and a 20 month old. All were/are cloth diapered. I hated prefolds and snappis. The kids were always wiggling out of them no matter how well I fastened them. I did not find that cloth diapers hastened training. But that's probably because around the 2.5 mark, no cloth combination I had could handle the volume of pee they could unleash at any one time and I got sick of changing clothes at every diaper change.
For the first two kiddos I went with Motherease once-size terry diapers(
http://www.mother-ease.com/cloth-diapers/onesizediapers ) and airflow covers (
http://www.mother-ease.com/cloth-diapers/airflowcovers ). I bought some new and most used on Ebay. I was able to diaper both of them in cloth for a combined 5 years for $350 in actual product investment. Laundry costs were about $.70 a load totaling an estimated $400 over the 5 years. I made cloth wipes from cut up flannel squares that I hemmed.
My laundry routine with them was to keep the dirty diapers soaking and pour the whole bucket into the washer and spin out the yuckiness. Then I ran a rinse. Then a full wash on hot with 1 TB of Arm & Hammer clear detergent, then another rinse. I would tumble dry them for 15 minutes and then hang them all out in the sun to further dry, sanitize and whiten. I washed every 2-3 days.
I gave away all the diapers that were in poor-fair condition on Freecycle and saved the good ones.
Here's something I learned with buying used diapers. I paid 60% of original price for premium, used diapers, that "looked" to be in very good condition. I also bought a few new ones from the manufacturer. After a couple years of use, the new ones still looked really good but the used ones were practically in tatters. This led me to conclude that this diaper brand could be used a year or two and sold at half what was paid. 4 year old diapers aren't worth anything at all. So at least for ME diapers, there's no actual savings for buying used as long as you are planning to sell them when you are done diapering.
So with baby #3 I had half a dozen good ME one-size diapers saved and half a dozen covers in good shape. I like to have 24 diapers in my stock for the newborn stage and 18 for older stages. So I bought $100 worth of ME AIO diapers , new, (
http://www.mother-ease.com/cloth-diapers/mother-ease-all-in-one-cloth-diapers ) and $50 worth of fabric, notions and used cotton t-shirts to make up the difference I needed to fill my stock. I used a free online tutorial (
http://fernandfaerie.com/sewing_fitteds.html )as my starting point and altered the pattern to better fit my baby. These diapers cost an insanely low $.50-.70 each, took less than an hour to make, and really require no special knowledge of sewing or the ability to do it well. You can sew like a crazy person and they still turn out looking and working great. Here some I made on my blog :http://latelyreconstructed.wordpress.com/tag/homemade-diaper/
My washing routine is different for #3. Kid #2 developed all kinds of allergies so drying anything outside is not an option anymore. I also started making homemade laundry detergent using the Dugger's recipe. We also switched to a toilet mounted diaper sprayer instead of the dunking method. I gave up soaking as it's messy and we found that it does not make a difference in odor or staining. So even though I only spent $150 on #3 diapers, laundry costs are about $1.10 a load. I wash twice a week.
I project our total cost to diaper three kids from birth to 2.5 will be less than $1200.
My motivations were equally about saving money, which we did but at only about 25% compared to economy disposables, and not creating tons of waste plastic in landfills. If my motivation were only saving money, I would have made prefolds work no matter how much it annoyed me. Another advantage of "premium" cloth diapers or any fitted cloth is that those with absolutely no cloth experience can figure out how to use them. My hubby was not on board with the idea of cloth with flat diapers but he easily adapted to fitted. Babysitters and grandparents are able to use fitteds without instructions. This is important because the more people around you that support your decision to cloth diaper, the easier it will be to keep it up. There are so many pressures and things to decide that first year and support is a really big deal for anything you are trying to implement.