Is Handwrytten or Lob cheaper?

Handwrytten starts at $3.75 per card with no subscription, or $374 per month on an annual Pro plan (free trial). Lob starts at $0 per month with postcards at $0.905 each (free plan available).

Handwrytten vs Lob

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Handwrytten compared with Lob

Lob is a direct mail API for developers sending postcards, letters, and checks at machine scale, starting free up to 6,000 pieces a year with postcards under a dollar. Handwrytten is a handwriting service for low-volume, high-attention pieces. If you are mailing tens of thousands of statements, notices, or offers programmatically, Lob is the correct tool and Handwrytten is not. If you are mailing 200 notes to named accounts and want them to look personal, Handwrytten is right and Lob will feel like industrial printing.

Lob compared with Handwrytten

Handwrytten writes with a real pen and sells single cards at $3.75 plus postage; Lob prints industrially at $0.828 a letter with postage included and a free plan to 6,000 pieces a year. Choose Handwrytten when the whole value of the send is that it looks like a person wrote it, typically for a few hundred named accounts. Choose Lob when you are mailing thousands of pieces on a trigger and the design is machine-printed anyway, because you will pay roughly a quarter as much per delivered piece.

Choose Handwrytten if

Small sales teams, agencies, real estate and automotive professionals, ecommerce brands, and founders who want a physical touch that costs a few dollars rather than a few hundred, and who already have mailing addresses or can buy them.

Choose Lob if

Developer-led teams and ecommerce or fintech operations that need physical mail triggered by application events at volume, and any small business that wants to send a few thousand pieces a year at under a dollar each without hiring a print vendor.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Handwrytten	Lob
Category	Gifting	Gifting
Starting price	$3.75 per card with no subscription, or $374 per month on an annual Pro plan (free trial)	$0 per month with postcards at $0.905 each (free plan available)
Pricing model	Pay per card with no commitment, or buy a monthly platform plan that lowers the per-card rate. Postage is always billed separately at prevailing USPS rates, and gift cards or inserts are billed at face value on top.	Freemium platform plan plus per-piece pricing. The plan fee buys an annual volume allowance, a seat count, and lower per-piece rates; postage is included in the per-piece price through presorted mail classes. Address verification is metered separately.
Free plan	No	Developer: $0 per month, one user, up to 6,000 mailings per year at standard rates (postcard $0.905, letter $0.828, check $1.190).
Free trial	No free trial; free physical samples are offered so you can judge the handwriting before spending anything	No time-limited trial; the free Developer plan is the evaluation path and is a usable production plan
Best for	Small sales teams, agencies, real estate and automotive professionals, ecommerce brands, and founders who want a physical touch that costs a few dollars rather than a few hundred, and who already have mailing addresses or can buy them.	Developer-led teams and ecommerce or fintech operations that need physical mail triggered by application events at volume, and any small business that wants to send a few thousand pieces a year at under a dollar each without hiring a print vendor.
Setup time	Under an hour for a first send. Create an account, choose a card, pick a handwriting style, paste a message, and check out. Connecting Salesforce or HubSpot takes another hour or two, and custom stationery design adds a few days of proofing.	An afternoon for a developer to make the first live send: create an account, take the test key, render a template, switch to the live key. A production lifecycle mail program with triggers, verification, and webhook handling is a one to two week engineering project.
Learning curve	Low. The dashboard is a card configurator plus a recipient list, and the only genuine skill involved is writing a short note that does not read like marketing copy. Teams that paste their email sequence into the card get poor results and blame the channel.	Low for developers, high for everyone else. HTML templates and REST calls are familiar territory if you write code and completely foreign if you do not. Marketing teams typically need engineering support for the initial build and can then operate campaigns from the dashboard.
Platforms	Web dashboard, iOS app, Android app, REST API	REST API, Web dashboard, Webhooks, HTML template engine
Compliance	Standard US commercial mail handling, No SOC 2 or ISO certification advertised publicly	SOC 2 Type 2 (independently audited), HIPAA and HITECH support, Industry-standard encryption in transit and at rest
Founded	2014	2013
Headquarters	Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona, United States	San Francisco, California, United States
Ownership	Privately held, founder-led	Venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Handwrytten

Strengths

Genuine robotic writing with a real pen on real card stock, built and patented in-house, which survives the thumb-smudge test that printed handwriting fonts fail.
You can send a single card for under five dollars with no subscription, which is close to unique in a category built on platform fees and annual contracts.
Deep integration coverage for a company this size: Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, Zapier, Make, Integrately, an API, and vertical connectors for automotive dealerships and nonprofit fundraising.
Custom handwriting and signature replication makes notes from a named person plausible rather than generic, which matters when the recipient knows the sender.

Limitations

You must have the mailing address. There is no choice link, no email-first flow, and no way to send to someone whose address you do not know, which is the single biggest workflow gap versus the gifting platforms.
No gift catalog, no recipient choice, no spend approval workflow, and no per-user budget controls, so it cannot serve as a governed company gifting program.
The monthly plans are expensive relative to the volume most small teams actually send; Pro at $449 needs roughly 255 cards a month before it beats the no-commitment rate.
Postage is quoted separately everywhere, which makes the advertised per-card prices look better than the real all-in number until you do the arithmetic.

Lob

Strengths

A free production plan covering up to 6,000 mailings a year, which lets a small business run real direct mail with no platform fee at all.
Per-piece pricing under a dollar with postage included, roughly three to four times cheaper per delivered piece than handwritten-note vendors and far below any gifting platform's cost per touch.
The best attribution in the category: eight tracking events per piece delivered through the API and webhooks, keyed to your own record identifiers, so a controlled experiment is genuinely possible.
A distributed Print Delivery Network with Postal IQ routing, GRACoL color standards, and monthly printer quality reviews, which is infrastructure no individual buyer could assemble.

Limitations

It is not a gifting platform in any sense: no catalog, no recipient choice, no gift cards, no spend approvals, and no fulfilment of physical products.
Nothing it produces looks handwritten. If the goal is a piece that reads as personal correspondence, Lob is the wrong tool no matter how good the print quality is.
It requires engineering time. The dashboard exists but the product is an API, and non-technical marketing teams will not get value from it without a developer.
The print network is US-based, so international mailing is not the use case despite international address verification being available.

Pricing compared

Handwrytten

Pay per card with no commitment, or buy a monthly platform plan that lowers the per-card rate. Postage is always billed separately at prevailing USPS rates, and gift cards or inserts are billed at face value on top.

Pay as you go$3.75
Pro$449
Enterprise$649
Elite$849
Agency$2,499

On pure cost per physical touch, Handwrytten is the cheapest credible option in this category for a small team, and the reason is structural: you can spend $3.75 and stop. Gifting platforms charge a platform fee before you have sent anything, and handwritten-note competitors either require a prepaid credit block or a monthly subscription. The monthly plans here are only worth buying above roughly 250 cards a month, and a lot of buyers who sign up for Pro would have been better off on pay as you go for another two quarters. Judged as a note service it is priced fairly; judged as a gifting platform it is not competing, because it is not one.

Lob

Freemium platform plan plus per-piece pricing. The plan fee buys an annual volume allowance, a seat count, and lower per-piece rates; postage is included in the per-piece price through presorted mail classes. Address verification is metered separately.

Developer$0
Startup$260
Growth$550
EnterpriseCustom

Per physical touch delivered, Lob is the cheapest option in this category by a factor of three or four, and the free plan means a small business can run 6,000 pieces a year for nothing but per-piece cost. That comparison is not entirely fair, because a Lob postcard and a handwritten note are not the same product, and neither is a gift. What is fair to say is that if the piece does not need to look personal, paying $3.58 for a handwritten card or a platform fee for a gifting seat is money spent on a format decision rather than on reaching the recipient. Lob is also the only vendor here with SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA-capable routing, and eight tracking events per piece, which makes it the value leader on infrastructure quality as well as price.

Editorial verdict on each

Handwrytten

Handwrytten is the lowest-friction way for a small business to test physical mail, and the pricing structure is the reason. Nobody else in this category lets you spend $3.75, look at what arrives, and decide. The robots write with a real pen, the integration list is unusually deep for a company this size, and gift cards go in the envelope at face value with no platform cut. Buy it if you have mailing addresses and want a cheap, credible physical touch wired into HubSpot or Salesforce. Do not buy it as a gifting program: there is no recipient choice, no address collection, no spend governance, and no way to recover the money when a card goes unopened. And be honest about volume before signing up for a monthly plan, because most teams who buy Pro would have spent less staying on pay as you go.

Read the full Handwrytten profile

Lob

Category Leader

Lob is not a gifting platform and does not pretend to be, but it is the strongest piece of physical mail infrastructure a small business can get for free. Six thousand mailings a year at under a dollar each with postage included, eight tracking events per piece, address verification, SOC 2 Type 2, and HIPAA-capable print routing is a stack that nothing else in this category comes close to. The price of admission is engineering time and the acceptance that nothing you send will look handwritten. Buy it if physical mail is a lifecycle or transactional channel in your product and you have a developer. Do not buy it if what you actually need is a gift, a personal note, or an address you do not have, because Lob solves none of those problems and three other vendors here do.

Read the full Lob profile

Handwrytten profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Lob last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.