Lob vs PostGrid
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
Editorial assessmentPostGrid compared with Lob
Lob is the incumbent in programmatic direct mail with 8,500-plus customers, roughly $80 million raised, and a published ladder from free through $260 and $550 monthly plans that takes a postcard down to $0.615. PostGrid is cheaper to start, has the stronger address verification product, and covers HIPAA and Canadian health data, but has no published tier between free and Enterprise. Pick Lob if you want to model unit costs at 75,000 pieces a year from a public rate card; pick PostGrid if address hygiene, Canadian coverage, or healthcare compliance is the deciding factor.
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.
Choose PostGrid if
Developer-led teams in healthcare, insurance, fintech, and B2B SaaS that need compliant transactional mail triggered by application events, and any small business whose real problem is a dirty address list rather than a print vendor.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Lob | PostGrid |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Gifting | Gifting |
| Starting price | $0 per month with postcards at $0.905 each (free plan available) | $0 per month with 4x6 postcards at $0.902 each (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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 platform plan plus per-piece pricing with printing and postage included. Address verification is a separately priced product. Above 500 mailings a month there is no published tier, only a quoted Enterprise plan. |
| Free plan | 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). | Starter: $0 per month, one user, ten templates, a single delivery network, and up to 500 mailings per month at standard per-piece rates. |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; the free Developer plan is the evaluation path and is a usable production plan | No time-limited trial; the free Starter plan is the evaluation path and is usable in production |
| Best for | 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. | Developer-led teams in healthcare, insurance, fintech, and B2B SaaS that need compliant transactional mail triggered by application events, and any small business whose real problem is a dirty address list rather than a print vendor. |
| Setup time | 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. | An afternoon for a developer to get a test postcard rendering and a live one in the mail. Longer if you are also cleaning a list, because bulk verification and NCOA on a large file is the step that actually takes days. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Moderate and front-loaded. The API itself is conventional REST and reads quickly. The genuinely unfamiliar parts are postal ones: mail class selection, presort eligibility, what CASS certification does and does not guarantee, and why a technically valid address can still be undeliverable. |
| Platforms | REST API, Web dashboard, Webhooks, HTML template engine | Web dashboard, REST API, Language SDKs, Bulk CSV upload, Webhooks |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type 2 (independently audited), HIPAA and HITECH support, Industry-standard encryption in transit and at rest | SOC 2, HIPAA, PHIPA, PIPEDA, GDPR, USPS CASS certified |
| Founded | 2013 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Boston, Massachusetts, with Canadian origins in Toronto and operations across the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Privately held |
Strengths and limitations
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.
PostGrid
Strengths
- Address verification is a real product rather than a checkbox: CASS certified, NCOA, delivery point validation, residential flagging, geocoding, and 250-plus country coverage, which directly attacks the largest source of waste in direct mail.
- The free Starter plan is a usable production plan with the full API, not a crippled demo, and 500 mailings a month covers a genuine small-business transactional programme.
- Compliance breadth is unusual for a self-serve product: HIPAA, PHIPA, PIPEDA, GDPR, and SOC 2 make it viable for healthcare and financial notices that most marketing-first mail vendors cannot touch.
- Three independent attribution signals, carrier tracking plus personalized QR codes plus pURLs, which is more resolution than most competitors offer.
Limitations
- The pricing ladder has a hole in it. Free up to 500 pieces a month, then nothing published until Enterprise, so the exact moment your programme starts working is the moment you enter a sales cycle.
- International postage is not published at all, which makes any cross-border programme unmodellable from the outside despite the excellent international address coverage.
- The product is written for developers. The dashboard exists but the documentation, the template model, and the error surface all assume someone comfortable with HTML and HTTP.
- No gifting capability whatsoever, which matters because buyers arrive at this category wanting one vendor for both jobs and PostGrid does exactly half of it.
Pricing compared
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.
PostGrid
Free platform plan plus per-piece pricing with printing and postage included. Address verification is a separately priced product. Above 500 mailings a month there is no published tier, only a quoted Enterprise plan.
- Starter$0
- EnterpriseCustom
For a small business the free Starter plan is close to unbeatable: a production-grade mail API with test environments, HIPAA coverage, and CASS verification for no subscription, at $0.902 a postcard with postage in the price. Against a local print shop the comparison is not really about unit cost, which will be similar at a few hundred pieces, it is that the print shop cannot be triggered by a webhook and will not tell you whether piece 143 was delivered. The value falls apart at the transition point. A business sending 3,000 pieces a month has outgrown the free tier and has no published rate to grow into, which is where competitors with real middle tiers win on procurement friction alone.
Editorial verdict on each
Lob
Category LeaderLob 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 profilePostGrid
PostGrid is the direct mail API you pick when the address list is the problem. The verification and NCOA layer is the best in this category, the compliance coverage opens healthcare and financial work that marketing-first vendors cannot take, and the free Starter plan is a genuinely usable production plan rather than a trial, which makes it one of the cheapest ways for a small business to start mailing programmatically. The weakness is commercial, not technical: there is no published tier between 500 pieces a month and an Enterprise quote, and no published international postage at all, so the platform is easiest to adopt and hardest to grow into. Start here if you are technical, US or Canadian, and mailing something that has to arrive. Look at Lob or Stannp if you want to see your price at 50,000 pieces before you write any code.
Read the full PostGrid profileLob profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; PostGrid last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.