Rate card
What a slot costs
One price per slot, per card, paid once. Design, printing and postage are all in it. There is no setup fee and no artwork fee. Nothing is billed monthly either.
The rate card
9x12 jumbo card
$499
per slot, per mailing
- About 5,000 homes in your chosen zone
- Full color, both sides, heavy stock
- Exclusive category on that card
- Ad designed and set for press
- Your web address and phone, printed legibly
- Your own QR code, with the scans counted
- Or take two slots together as the card's one double, $899
6x11 card
$249
per slot, per mailing
- About 2,500 homes in your chosen zone
- Sixteen advertiser slots, eight a side
- Exclusive category on that card
- Ad designed and set for press
- Your web address and phone, printed legibly along with an offer or coupon
- The cheapest way to test the channel
Prices are per mailing. Book three cards in a row in the same zone and each costs 10% less. Book six and each costs 15% less. Either way your trade is held on every card, and it is the same for both card sizes.
Optional add-ons
Not part of the slot price and not needed to advertise. Each is a separate yearly payment.
Optional add-on: call tracking · $49 a year
Not included in the slot price, and entirely optional. For $49 a year you get one local phone number of your own, in your area code and picked by you from a short list. It prints on your ad in place of your phone number, on every card you are on that year, and rings straight through to you.
Every call is counted for your results: real calls, missed calls, and short or likely spam calls shown apart. Miss one and we email you, or text you if you switch on text alerts, which come with call tracking. Nothing is recorded. It renews once a year and you can stop at any time from your account; the number keeps working for 60 days after that, then it is released. How call tracking works · How text alerts work.
Call tracking includes up to 1,500 forwarded minutes a year. Busy call tracking is $149 a year, with 5,000 minutes.
AI receptionist add-on · $99 a year
A virtual assistant for the calls you cannot take. When nobody picks up, it answers, says it is your virtual assistant, and takes a message: name, number, what they need, where, how urgent and when to call back. You get it by email within seconds, and by text too if you switch on text alerts. It only tells callers what you have told us about your business, never quotes prices or books jobs, and calls are never recorded. How the AI receptionist works.
The AI receptionist add-on requires call tracking. It is $99 a year on top of call tracking, so the two together are $148 a year. It includes up to 300 messages a year. Each is its own yearly payment that you can cancel on its own; if call tracking ends, the receptionist ends with it. Already have call tracking? Add it from your account.
For very busy phones
For phones that ring all day there is busy call tracking, $149 a year instead of $49 a year, with 5,000 forwarded minutes a year, and the busy receptionist, $249 a year instead of $99 a year, with 1,000 messages a year. Each part upgrades on its own, for the difference. Fair use: call tracking includes up to 1,500 forwarded minutes a year (busy call tracking, $149 a year, 5,000 minutes), and the AI receptionist add-on up to 300 messages a year (busy receptionist, $249 a year, 1,000 messages). Nothing is ever cut off if you go over.
Check availability
Is your category still open?
One business per trade, per card. Tell us what you do and which neighborhoods you want, and we will tell you the same working day whether the slot is still there and when that card mails.
- Checking takes one message and holds nothing.
- Where the category is taken we will say so and give you the next card's date.
- Nothing is charged until you have the price, the zone and the dates in writing.
Set against mailing on your own
The comparison worth making is not against a cheaper shared card. It is against what the same reach costs when you buy it alone, because that is the alternative most businesses are actually weighing.
A solo mailing to five thousand homes means paying full postage on five thousand pieces and printing five thousand cards, plus design. You get the whole card to yourself, which is genuinely worth something. Whether it is worth several times the price is the question, and for most local trades the honest answer is no, not until you have proved the channel works for you at all.
That is the case for starting here. Find out whether mail moves the needle for your business before you commit a mailing budget to it alone.
Reaching about 5,000 homes alone
- Postage on your own
- about $1,200
- Print on your own
- about $1,300
- Design, both sides
- about $600
- EDDM preparation
- about $400
- Total on your own
- about $3,500
- A slot on our jumbo card
- $499, all in
Postage and print figures are typical retail rates for an oversized card and move with USPS pricing, and EDDM preparation is the bundling, paperwork and post office drop a mail house charges for. Your slot price does not move.
What is included, spelled out
Design and press setup
Your ad laid out to fit the slot and set at press resolution with correct bleed. You approve a proof of it in position on the real card. No separate artwork charge.
Print and postage
The full print run and every cent of postage for the zone. The bundling, the paperwork and the trip to the post office are ours too.
Tracking and reporting
Your own QR code on the ad, opening your website or page, with every scan counted and shown to you. And an offer code if you want one, so the calls it produces are countable by you too.
What is not included: photography or video, or a website build. Nor is the cost of redeeming your offer. Any discount you put on the card is yours to honor. We will tell you if we think an offer is too thin to be worth printing.
No website yet? We build those too, as a separate product: a complete website, written and run for you, for one price a year.
Need more than six pages? We also quote custom websites, from $2,500 to $100,000. Anything is possible. How to ask for a quote.
What actually moves the price
A slot is a flat number, but the number is not arbitrary. Three things set it, and knowing them tells you whether a quote from anyone is reasonable.
How many homes
Postage is charged per piece, so a zone of five thousand homes costs meaningfully more to mail than one of two thousand. Bigger is not automatically better. A tighter zone around the streets you actually service usually beats a wider one that includes areas you would decline to drive to.
How big the card is
The jumbo card costs more to print and slightly more to mail than the smaller one, and it commands more attention for it. The gap between the two formats is roughly the gap in their slot prices, which is the honest way to present a choice rather than pushing everyone to the expensive one.
How many advertisers share it
Sixteen on each card. Those are the numbers that make the arithmetic work at a price any business can say yes to. Fewer slots would mean a higher price each. More would mean ads too small to read, which helps nobody on the card.
Against the other places you could spend it
The fairest thing we can do is tell you where a slot is and is not the best use of the same money, because you are going to work it out eventually anyway.
Search advertising catches people who already know they need you today. That is enormously valuable and nothing on a postcard replaces it. Not showing up when someone in your town searches for your trade? That is worth fixing but it can get expensive. The catch is that it only reaches people already looking. The cost per click in most trades has climbed steadily too, and the moment you stop paying you disappear.
Social advertising is cheap to reach a lot of people and hard to reach the right five thousand. Mail is the reverse. It costs more per household and it hits every single door in a defined area exactly once, whether or not that household is online, which in a lot of neighborhoods around here is a real advantage rather than a technicality.
What mail does that neither of the others does is put a physical object in a house. A card on a fridge is still working three months later. A scroll past is not. The homeowner may have the card on their fridge for the pizza coupon, but they also see your plumbing ad every time they walk into their kitchen.
The number that actually matters
Not the slot price. The number of jobs it takes to cover it.
A job worth a few hundred dollars means the slot has to produce a handful of customers to wash its face, and that is a real ask from one card. If your average job runs into the thousands, or a new customer stays with you for years, one conversion covers it several times over and the arithmetic stops being close. A restaurant or ice cream shop can gain repeat customers for years due to one ad.
Work out your own number before you book anything, with us or with anyone. If a single job does not come close to covering the slot, be honest with yourself about how many you would need and whether one card can plausibly deliver it.
Work out your number
Terms, in plain words
One payment, up front, refundable
The full slot price when you reserve. No deposit and no balance later. Until the card locks, that money is refundable in full if the card is delayed, and the date by which the card must fill is on your confirmation before you pay a cent. Miss that date and you choose: your money back, or 20% off your next card for staying with this one.
Nothing renews on its own
There is no rolling contract and no card that quietly bills you again. Advertisers from the last card keep their category held until they decide, and then it goes back on sale. You have to actively say yes each time.
Booking ahead costs less
Committing to several drops in the same zone holds your category across all of them and builds your brand awareness. It is also how mail actually works: the second and third time a household sees your name is doing more than the first.
Artwork changes until the deadline
You can change the offer or the phone number as often as you like, right up to the art deadline on your confirmation. Replacing the whole ad is fine too. After that the card is at the printer and nothing can move, which is why that date is stated up front rather than discovered later.
Where a slot is not the right spend
You are a national company
If you are Coke, Pepsi, United Airlines, Starbucks or another mega-company, this is probably not the best format for you unless you are opening a brand new market.
Your average job is small and one off
If a job is worth thirty dollars and the customer never returns, a slot needs to produce a lot of them to make sense. It is not impossible, but be honest about the number before you book rather than after.
You cannot handle the calls
Mail produces calls in bursts in the days after a drop. Nobody able to answer the phone that week and the card will look like it failed, when what actually failed was the follow up. Pick a mail date you can staff.
Why the price is on the page at all
Most shared mail is quoted privately, which usually means the number moves depending on how the conversation is going. Publishing it removes that, and it removes the part of the process where a business owner has to sit through a pitch to find out whether this is even in their range.
It also keeps us honest with ourselves. A published price is one we have to be able to justify against what a solo mailing costs, which is the comparison that actually matters to you. Should our number ever stop making sense against that, it belongs on this page rather than changing quietly in individual quotes.
What is not negotiable
Two things, and both exist to protect the other advertisers on your card. The exclusivity cannot be waived, so we will not sell a second business in your category even if both of you say you do not mind. And the minimum advertiser count cannot be waived, so a card will not go out early because one advertiser has a deadline. Everything else, including the zone boundary, the format, the offer and the schedule, is a conversation.
Rather talk it through? Leave a name and number and we will call you back.
Ready to reserve a slot?
Pick your category before someone else in your trade does. One business per category, per card.
Reserve a slot (888) 348-1992