We mail some postcards, but keep struggling with lob's pricing. We order postcards for ~3 cents and can mail them for ~30 cents.
Overall, this is about 1/3 (33 vs. 94 cents) the cost not including our time. It takes us about 20 sec write down the address therefore saving ~$1.80/min so ~$100/hr. We drive by a post office everyday so it isn't much trouble to mail them.
I guess the target market is those that have people filling out postcards for greater than $100/hr?
Thanks for the note. We obviously have bulk rates that get competitive when you get to higher volumes. Feel free to contact sales@lob.com if you are interested.
One thing to consider is you are ordering 100s of the exact same postcard. If you had to print out 500 different postcards, each going to 500 different addresses that you had to write, then apply postage to all 500, all of a sudden your time saving becomes hugely valuable. Not to mention you need to shop around for a printer, handle the image and prepress process, etc.
I think you'll find that if you shop around to competitors we are very competitive and in fact beat pricing with other comparable APIs.
Thanks for the reply, we print many of the same card. I could really see the value in having them individually printed (amazing!) so we may not be your target customer.
I don't even know of another API company in the space and was just considering our manual method.
http://mikerooney.rowk.com/2014/04/22/easily-sending-postcar...