Shippo

What Shippo actually does

Shippo is multi-carrier shipping software. You connect your store, it pulls in your orders, and when it is time to ship you compare live rates across carriers and buy the label at Shippo's pre-negotiated discount instead of the price you would pay at the counter. Around that core it layers the operational plumbing a small shipping desk needs: tracking, branded notification emails, packing slips, returns labels and rule-based automations that pick the service level for you. There are two ways in — the web dashboard for merchants, and a shipping API for teams who want to embed label purchase, rating and tracking inside their own product.

Who it's for

Three groups get obvious value. First, small e-commerce sellers shipping fewer than 30 parcels a month, who can run their entire shipping operation on the $0 plan indefinitely. Second, growing direct-to-consumer brands doing hundreds to thousands of labels who want one dashboard across carriers rather than juggling separate carrier portals. Third, developers and platforms: the API is one of the better-known ways to add shipping to a marketplace or SaaS product without negotiating carrier contracts yourself.

Pricing reality

The numbers, straight from Shippo's pricing page. Starter is $0/month for up to 30 labels a month and one user login, with all the core features included — discounted rates, store integrations, international shipping, automations, tracking and returns. The one catch: connecting your own carrier accounts on Starter costs $0.05 per label. Pro starts at $17/month on the entry tier and scales in volume bands up to 10,000 labels a month, with up to five user logins, free use of your own carrier accounts, branded tracking pages, AI-powered estimated delivery dates, and chat plus phone support. Annual billing is $205/year, which Shippo lists as a 10% saving against monthly. Go past 10,000 labels on Pro and overage runs $0.08 per label. Premier is custom-priced for unlimited shipments with 15+ users and a dedicated account manager. Two smaller line items worth knowing: validating non-US addresses costs 9¢ on Starter, 8¢ on Pro and 6¢ on Premier, and postage itself is always billed separately — the plan fee only covers the software.

How the offer works

There is no promo code and no time-limited trial gymnastics. You sign up, you are on the free plan, and the saving happens on every label: Shippo's negotiated carrier rates versus what you would pay retail, which the company advertises as up to 90% off on shipping labels. That "up to" is doing real work — the discount varies enormously by carrier, service level, parcel weight and zone — but even mid-single-digit percentage savings compound quickly once you ship daily. The honest way to evaluate it is to price five of your typical parcels through the free plan against what you currently pay. It costs nothing to run that test, which is exactly why we rate this deal.

Getting the most out of it

Three practical moves. First, rate-shop every parcel: the discount varies by carrier and service, so the habit of comparing rates per shipment — rather than defaulting to one carrier — is where most of the savings actually accrue, and Shippo's automations can encode that logic once you know your patterns (cheapest service under a set weight, fastest service for priority tags, and so on). Second, if you are on Starter and drifting past 30 labels in busy months, price the switch to Pro against the pain of manual workarounds: at $17/month the entry tier costs less than the margin on a handful of orders. Third, take the annual-billing option only once your volume is stable — $205/year saves 10%, but the monthly-to-annual switch is a commitment worth making after seasonality has shown itself, not before. Two smaller notes: API calls not associated with Shippo labels are billed separately at API Starter rates, so if you plan to rate heavily without purchasing (live rates at checkout, say), model that cost before you build. And if a meaningful share of your orders ship outside the US, fold the address-validation fee (9¢ on Starter, 8¢ on Pro) into your unit economics — trivial per parcel, real at thousands of parcels.

Honest limitations

The 30-label ceiling on Starter is a hard wall, and the nickel-per-label fee for using your own carrier accounts stings if you already have negotiated rates better than Shippo's. Support on the free plan is thinner — chat and phone support are listed as Pro features. And be clear about what Shippo is not: it is software, not fulfilment. You still store inventory, pick, pack and hand boxes to the carrier. If the physical work is what you want off your plate, software alone will not solve it.

How it compares

The most useful comparison is with ShipBob, which sits on the other side of that line: ShipBob is outsourced fulfilment — they warehouse your stock and ship for you — while Shippo just makes your own shipping cheaper and faster to run. Sub-scale brands typically start with Shippo economics and graduate to a 3PL like ShipBob when picking and packing eats too many founder hours. If you sell on Shopify, note that Shopify has its own built-in discounted shipping; Shippo earns its keep when you sell across multiple channels, want deeper automation and returns tooling, or need the API. There is also no lock-in pressure worth worrying about: because Starter is free and postage is pay-as-you-go, running Shippo alongside your current setup for a fortnight is a zero-cost experiment rather than a migration decision.

Verdict

Buy — in the sense of "sign up", because the entry price is zero. A permanently free plan with real discounted rates and no card-on-file games is rare in shipping software, and the upgrade path to Pro at $17/month is cheap relative to the time it saves once you pass a parcel a day. Run your own rate comparison on the free tier; if the rates beat what you pay today, the decision makes itself.