What does a mailing cost?
A mailing price consists of five items: print, personalising, finishing, making ready for dispatch and postage. Postage is usually by far the largest, and it is decided by size and weight.
Last updated: 22 August 2026 · Mark Bonenkamp, managing director of Vogelaar, chair of Stichting Postfilter and of the Postal Committee of the KVGO and member of the Postal Committee of the DDMA
One benchmark to make it tangible
From 250 items we mail a card at A5 size (210 × 148 mm) or postcard size (148 × 105 mm) for less than the cost of a single stamp. Printed, personalised, made ready for dispatch and mailed, all in, for less than what you pay over the counter for one stamp.
A standard stamp currently costs €1.40 (PostNL, rate from 12 July 2026). That figure changes; the comparison holds.
The five items, in the order they arise
| Item | What it is | What the price depends on |
|---|---|---|
| The printing itself, on our digital presses | Run length, size, paper type and weight, single- or double-sided, colour | |
| Personalising | Printing the name, address and everything that differs per recipient | How much changes per recipient: only the address, or text, imagery or a unique code as well |
| Finishing | Folding, wrapping, banding, enveloping, inserting inserts | The number of operations per item, and whether it can be done by machine or has to be done by hand |
| Making ready for dispatch | Coding, sorting, bundling and handing in according to the carrier's requirements | Run length and the spread of the addresses |
| Postage | What the carrier charges | Size, weight, the chosen delivery option, and how you hand in |
On top of that there is work that is not always needed and therefore not always in the price: processing your address file, producing a print-ready file if you do not supply one, and storage if the item goes out later than it is printed.
Why postage is usually by far the largest item
Print gets cheaper per item as the run grows. Postage does not: that is an amount per mail item, and it stays roughly the same whether you send five hundred or fifty thousand. So on a small run the print weighs heavily, and on a large run the weight shifts to postage.
And postage is the item that can run away the fastest. Between two mailings that look the same on paper, the postage can easily differ by a factor of two, and more when the size or the weight is just off.
That explains why the first question we ask is not about paper but about size and weight. PostNL charges bulk mail in six weight bands, and a millimetre or a gram over a line changes the postage on the whole run.
What you can do about that is set out at length on saving on postage.
What brings the price per item down
- Staying inside a weight band. A lighter paper or one section fewer is often cheaper than the next band up.
- Mailing unwrapped. Addressing straight onto the cover saves film and an operation.
- Handing in the way the carrier wants it. Coding, sorting and splitting earn a discount. That is why we bring your addresses and your layout together: without coding and sorting that discount lapses.
- A clean address file. Every item that does not arrive is postage and print wasted.
- Joining our volume. Our production can handle around half a million mail items a day, so a run that is too small for a rate band on its own still falls into the right sorting with us.
What drives the price up without your seeing it coming
- Just over a line. A gram or a millimetre, and the whole run falls into a more expensive band.
- A file that is not print-ready. Then layout work comes on top that was not budgeted.
- Changes after the proof. A correction to the text is small; a correction that touches the size or the weight changes the whole calculation.
- Handwork. An insert that cannot go through by machine is inserted by hand. That is possible, but it is a different price.
- Rush. We do not charge a standard rush surcharge. But a rush job does force different choices in paper, machine and dispatch, and those can work out more expensive.
Why there is no price list on this page
Because it would be wrong for almost everybody. A direct mail has dozens of inputs: size, paper, weight, the number of operations, what changes per recipient, the delivery option, the spread of the addresses. Two mailings that look the same on paper therefore come out very differently. A rate per item would then be either too high, so that you walk away from something that could have been cheaper, or too low, and then the first quote does not hold.
What we do instead: explain where the price comes from, and think it through before anything is printed. That is the moment when you can still change the price.
Want to know what your mailing costs? Request a quote and we will cost it out, including the rate band you fall into. If you do not yet know exactly what you want to send, start at Direct mail.
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