lib/pricing.ts, the same numbers
POST /v1/quotes returns), and every USPS fee is the published rate from
USPS Notice 123 (effective
2026-07-12). The two inputs that are genuinely yours to guess —
staff time per letter and your fully-loaded hourly rate — are called
out as illustrative defaults. Swap in your own and redo the arithmetic; it’s
addition and multiplication the whole way down.
The formula
paperplane’s price, in full
One page, black & white, no add-ons — the base rate for each mail class:
Add 0.50/page for color, so a 3-page
color certified letter is
$12.99 + 2×$0.25 (extra pages) + 3×$0.50 (color) = $14.99.
These are the exact numbers
POST /v1/quotes returns for page_count: 1,
color: false on each mail_class — nothing here is rounded for effect.Illustrative defaults (change these)
Nothing in this section is a real measurement of your operation — it’s a
starting guess so the worked example below has numbers in it. Replace both
before trusting a total.
Worked example, per letter
Plugging the defaults above into the formula:
Priority is the honest exception: the USPS 5.55 certified fee is fixed either
way, so the deciding factor is how many minutes the window trip costs you.
Breakeven: how much staff time makes paperplane cheaper
Rearranging the formula for the minute count where manual cost equals paperplane’s price answers a more useful question than any single volume example — at your hourly rate, how many minutes does prepping a letter need to take before it’s worth not doing it yourself:
If your certified-mail process — printing, the paper form, the walk to the
counter, the wait — takes longer than about 13 minutes at a $30/hr loaded
rate, paperplane is already cheaper per letter, before counting the time back
from the post office or the trip you didn’t make at all.
Monthly totals at volume
Certified mail (demand letters, notices, collections) is the case most teams actually ask about, so here it is at three illustrative volumes, same defaults as above:
The dollar gap per letter is modest — the fixed USPS certified fee dominates
both sides. The staff-hours column is where the case usually gets made: at
200 certified letters/month, 15 minutes each is 50 hours of someone’s time
back, every month, regardless of what their hourly rate is.
For First-Class at the same volumes and defaults, both columns move more:
306/$1,530 saved and 4.2/16.7/83.3 hours reclaimed at 50/200/1,000
letters/month respectively.
What this doesn’t count
- Error and reprint cost. A paper jam, a wrong envelope window, a transposed ZIP that bounces — none of that is in the manual-side numbers.
- Standing overhead — a printer, toner stock, envelope stock, and the staff time to reorder them, doesn’t show up as a per-letter line, but it’s real and it’s zero on paperplane.
- Address correction. paperplane runs every recipient through USPS address standardization before mailing; a bad address caught after a manual mailing is a second trip.
Try it with real numbers
POST /v1/quotes for the exact price of your actual mail class, page count,
and add-ons — see the quickstart. Sending more than a handful
a month is what bulk import and
prepaid credits are for.