If you mail fewer than about 750 invoices a month, stamps are the cheapest way to pay for postage. Stamps.com and a postage meter each take four cents off a letter and charge a monthly fee, and four cents does not cover the fee until you reach that volume. Bulk rates need 500 pieces in a single mailing.
So for most small businesses the real choice is whether to keep printing, stuffing and stamping, or pay a mailing service to do it. If you mail fewer than a dozen invoices a month, the service costs less once you count the trip for stamps and envelopes. Above that, the answer turns on who does the work and what an hour of their time is worth.
Four ways to pay for postage, and what each one costs#
Stamps. $0.82 for a one-ounce letter at current First-Class rates, and no fee. You print, fold, stuff, stamp and mail.
Stamps.com. You print postage on your own printer at the metered rate, $0.78. The Basic plan is $14.99 a month and covers 25 stamps; past that, each stamp carries a $0.39 overage fee. The Professional plan is $29.99 a month with no cap. You still print and stuff every envelope.
A postage meter. Also $0.78 a letter. Pitney Bowes' meter for light mail volumes, the SendPro Mailstation, rents for $29.99 a month after a 60-day trial. You still print and stuff every envelope.
A mailing service. You upload the invoice and the service prints it, puts it in an envelope and mails it. Postmarkr, which is our service, charges $2.05 for a one-page black-and-white letter ($2.52 in color) with no monthly fee. That covers printing, the envelope, First-Class postage and the processing fee.
To compare them, add up three things for each letter:
Cost per letter = postage + supplies + your time
Supplies come to about a dime on a low-cost printer. At Staples a #10 security envelope is about 6 cents and a sheet of paper about 1.5 cents. Printing the page costs about 3 cents on the cheapest-to-run laser printer Toner Buzz has found, and 5 to 8 cents on an average one, which puts supplies at up to about 16 cents. For time we use one minute a letter at $25 an hour, which is 42 cents. One minute assumes you work through the batch in one sitting. $25 sits a little above the $21.64 median hourly wage for office clerks (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025). Both are assumptions, so run the formula with your own numbers, or try them in our mail cost calculator. It starts from its own defaults, so change the wage and minutes to match your office.
On that math a stamped invoice costs $1.34, a metered one $1.30 plus the monthly fee, and one sent through Postmarkr $2.05.
What each option costs a month, from 10 to 1,000 invoices#
Invoices a month | Stamps | Stamps.com | Postage meter | Postmarkr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
10 | $13 | $28 | $43 | $21 |
25 | $33 | $47 | $62 | $51 |
50 | $67 | $90 | $95 | $103 |
100 | $134 | $160 | $160 | $205 |
250 | $334 | $354 | $354 | $513 |
750 | $1,003 | $1,002 | $1,002 | $1,538 |
1,000 | $1,337 | $1,327 | $1,327 | $2,050 |
The first three columns include supplies and one minute of your time per letter. The Postmarkr column is the price alone, because there is nothing to print or stuff. Two things are left out: the minutes it takes to upload invoices, and on the do-it-yourself side the trip for stamps and envelopes.
Three things stand out. Stamps give the lowest total at every volume below 750. Stamps.com and a meter draw level with stamps at 750 and lead by $10 at 1,000. Postmarkr is the second-lowest total at 10 invoices, below both options that charge a monthly fee, and sits above stamps at every volume: about $7 more at 10 and $71 more at 100. Add the monthly trip for stamps and envelopes and Postmarkr costs less than stamps below about 12 invoices a month. The section on stamps versus a mailing service, below, shows that math.
Where Stamps.com and a postage meter start to pay#
Both save four cents a letter against a stamp. A $29.99 monthly fee divided by four cents is 750 letters. Below that the fee is larger than the saving, and above it you keep the difference. The $14.99 Stamps.com plan does not get there, because its 25 stamps save $1.00 a month.
Some offices should have one anyway. Stamps.com prints shipping labels, and its higher plans add Certified Mail. A meter prints the exact postage for a heavier envelope. Neither needs a trip to buy stamps. If you already pay for one to ship packages, the fee is spent and each letter costs $0.78, though on the Stamps.com Basic plan every stamp past 25 a month adds the $0.39 overage fee. Our Stamps.com comparison works through that case.
Bulk rates are the other option you will have heard of. USPS commercial First-Class prices run from $0.621 to $0.707 for a one-ounce automation letter, 11 to 20 cents under a stamp. They require at least 500 pieces in one mailing and a $390 annual mailing fee, so a business mailing 100 invoices pays the retail price. Our guide to commercial First-Class Mail rates covers what qualifying takes.
What a mailing service takes off your desk#
With a mailing service the invoice leaves your office as a file. Nobody prints, folds, buys envelopes or finds a mailbox. A monthly invoice run in Postmarkr goes like this:
- Import your customer addresses once from a CSV file. They stay in your address book for next month.
- Upload an invoice PDF and pick the customer. The address is checked for USPS deliverability before you pay.
- Check the preview of the printed letter.
- Add it to the cart, do the same for the next invoice, and pay for up to ten letters in one checkout.
When every customer gets the same layout, such as a statement or a payment reminder, build it once as a template with fields for the name, balance and due date. Then upload a CSV of customers, and up to 100 letters go out as one batch with one payment.
After you pay, your dashboard shows processing milestones and USPS scan updates when available. There is no subscription and no minimum. You can send a letter online or read the full pricing. If you are choosing between services, our guide to invoice printing and mailing services covers what to compare.
Stamps or a mailing service: it comes down to whose minute it is#
Postmarkr costs $1.13 more per letter than a stamp and supplies: $2.05 against $0.92. That is before counting anyone's time, which the table above priced at 42 cents a letter. The gap is the same at 10 invoices or 1,000. What it buys is the printing, folding, stuffing and stamping, so the question is what that work costs you.
Who does the mailing | The service pays when a letter takes longer than |
|---|---|
An admin at $25 an hour | 2.7 minutes |
An owner or bookkeeper at $50 an hour | 1.4 minutes |
An owner or bookkeeper at $75 an hour | 0.9 minutes |
At one minute a letter, an admin at $25 an hour does the job for less than the service. Once the hour is worth more than about $68, the service is the cheaper way. If a letter takes longer than a minute in your office, the service pays at a lower hourly rate, as the table shows.
Over a month, 50 invoices through the service cost $56.50 more than stamps and supplies and replace 50 minutes of printing, folding and stamping with uploading files. At 100 invoices it is $113 and an hour and forty minutes.
Errands change the math at small volumes. Buying stamps and envelopes and getting to a mailbox takes about the same time whether you mail 5 invoices or 50. Assume one 20-minute errand a month at $25 an hour, which is $8.33, and the service costs less below about 12 invoices a month. At 10 invoices that is $21.70 doing it yourself against $20.50 through Postmarkr.
Keep buying stamps if someone in the office has the time, the printer is already running and the batch goes quickly. Hand the job off if the person stuffing envelopes is worth more than about $68 an hour, if the job takes longer than the minutes in the table, if the office has no printer, if nobody is in on invoice day, or if you mail fewer than a dozen a month. For a fuller count of what in-house mailing costs, see the true cost of running a mailroom.
If an invoice runs to more pages#
With stamps, postage goes by weight. A stamp covers the first ounce, and each additional ounce is $0.29, so an envelope between one and two ounces costs $1.11. Extra pages cost you only paper and toner until the envelope passes one ounce. With Postmarkr, each additional black-and-white page adds about 21 cents, so a two-page invoice is $2.26.
How we calculated this#
Postage comes from the USPS price list effective July 12, 2026: $0.82 stamped and $0.78 metered for a one-ounce letter. The 500-piece minimum for commercial prices is from USPS Business Mail 101. Stamps.com fees are from its pricing page and help center, checked September 8, 2026. The meter price is the rental Pitney Bowes lists for the SendPro Mailstation, checked October 1, 2026. Envelope and paper prices are Staples' listed prices on October 1, 2026: $30.99 for 500 #10 security envelopes and $7.59 for a 500-sheet ream. Printing costs are from Toner Buzz, read the same day. Postmarkr's prices are from our pricing page on the same day.
The Stamps.com column uses whichever plan is cheaper at each volume: Basic at 10, 25 and 50 invoices (with 25 overage stamps at 50), and Professional from 100. Stamps.com's pricing page does not say whether postage printed on envelopes counts toward the Basic plan's 25-stamp limit. We treated it as counting.
Four numbers are assumptions: a dime of supplies, one minute a letter, $25 an hour and, in the low-volume comparison only, one 20-minute errand a month. We did not time either way of working. Our mailroom cost article uses a slower pace (three to seven minutes a letter) and a longer post-office trip. We assumed a faster pace here, for a batch done in one sitting. If your pace is slower, the service pays sooner.
The table leaves out meter ink, the time a meter or Stamps.com saves on stamping, and the time it takes to upload invoices to a mailing service. Totals are rounded to the nearest dollar, so a difference quoted in the text can be a dollar off the table.
Postmarkr is our service and competes with the other options here.