Lob vs Simply Noted
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in Corporate Gifting & Direct Mail for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Both sides assessedLob compared with Simply Noted
Simply Noted's cheapest possible handwritten card is $0.84 plus $0.82 postage at 50,000 units; Lob's postcard is $0.615 including postage on a $550 plan with no minimum order. Simply Noted wins whenever the handwriting is the point, and only then. For transactional mail, notices, checks, or high-volume offers, Lob is cheaper, has real tracking events, and carries SOC 2 Type 2 that Simply Noted does not publish.
Simply Noted compared with Lob
Lob is an API-first direct mail platform for programmatic postcards, letters, and checks, free up to 6,000 pieces a year and under a dollar a postcard. Simply Noted is a handwriting operation where the point is that the piece looks personal. If you are mailing transactional notices or high-volume offers and the design is machine-printed anyway, Lob is far cheaper. If the whole value of the send is that it does not look machine-printed, Lob cannot do it and Simply Noted can.
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 Simply Noted if
Teams that already know handwritten mail works for them and send hundreds to thousands of cards a month, especially real estate, hospitality, insurance, mortgage, franchise, and B2B sales operations that want the per-card price driven down and the sends triggered from a CRM.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Lob | Simply Noted |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Gifting | Gifting |
| Starting price | $0 per month with postcards at $0.905 each | $2.76 per card (100-credit block, $358 all in with postage) (free trial) |
| 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. | Prepaid card credits with published volume tiers, or a flat monthly rate for unlimited notes. Postage is charged separately at $0.82 per card at First-Class rates. |
| 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). | No |
| Free trial | No time-limited trial; the free Developer plan is the evaluation path and is a usable production plan | No free trial; free samples and a first-card offer for email subscribers let you judge the handwriting before buying a block |
| 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. | Teams that already know handwritten mail works for them and send hundreds to thousands of cards a month, especially real estate, hospitality, insurance, mortgage, franchise, and B2B sales operations that want the per-card price driven down and the sends triggered from a CRM. |
| 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. | A day or two for a first campaign. Buying credits and uploading a CSV is immediate; custom card design and handwriting selection add a short proofing cycle. Salesforce or Zapier automation takes a few hours of configuration. |
| 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. | Low on the tooling and moderate on the strategy. The dashboard is straightforward. The real work is deciding message, timing, and volume tier, and resisting the temptation to write marketing copy on a card that only works because it does not read like marketing. |
| Platforms | REST API, Web dashboard, Webhooks, HTML template engine | Web dashboard, REST API, Zapier |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type 2 (independently audited), HIPAA and HITECH support, Industry-standard encryption in transit and at rest | Standard US commercial mail handling, No SOC 2 or ISO certification advertised publicly |
| Founded | 2013 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Phoenix, Arizona, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Bootstrapped, founder-owned |
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.
Simply Noted
Strengths
- Fully published volume rate card with per-card, total, and postage figures at seven tiers, which is a level of pricing transparency almost nobody else in corporate gifting offers.
- Real ballpoint pen on paper from a fleet of roughly 225 purpose-built machines with nine patents, so quality holds at volume rather than degrading.
- The $497 flat-rate unlimited plan is the cheapest way to send high volumes of handwritten mail anywhere in this category, and it includes API, CRM, Zapier, and webhook automation rather than gating them.
- Bootstrapped past $10 million in revenue with no outside investment, which means no investor pressure toward enterprise repositioning or a forced price rise.
Limitations
- The minimum meaningful purchase is 100 cards at $358, so you cannot cheaply test whether the channel works for you before committing.
- The unlimited plan's advertised per-note rate assumes a volume most small teams will never hit; below about 560 notes a month it is the wrong plan and the credit blocks are better.
- Integration coverage is thinner than Handwrytten's: Salesforce natively, everything else through Zapier or the API. There is no first-party HubSpot or Shopify connector published on the integrations page.
- No gift catalog, no recipient choice, no spend controls, and no email-first sending, so it cannot serve as a governed gifting program and cannot reach anyone whose address you lack.
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.
Simply Noted
Prepaid card credits with published volume tiers, or a flat monthly rate for unlimited notes. Postage is charged separately at $0.82 per card at First-Class rates.
- Prepay 100 credits$2.76
- Prepay 1,000 credits$1.79
- Prepay 10,000 credits$1.15
- Unlimited$497
- Prepay 50,000 credits$0.84
At volume this is the best price per physical touch available in the category, and the flat-rate unlimited plan is genuinely aggressive: above roughly 560 cards a month, one more note costs you nothing but a stamp. That changes behaviour, because teams stop rationing sends. Below a few hundred cards a month the picture inverts. A 100-credit block at $3.58 all in is more expensive than sending single cards at Handwrytten, and the $497 unlimited plan is terrible value at 150 notes. Simply Noted is priced for people who have already validated the channel, and it is honest enough to publish the entire rate card so you can work out where you sit.
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 profileSimply Noted
Simply Noted is what you buy when you have already proved handwritten mail works and now want the cost per touch driven into the ground. The robotics are genuinely good, the rate card is published in full down to the postage line, and the $497 flat-rate unlimited plan is the most aggressive pricing anywhere in this category above about 560 notes a month. It is not a starter product: the 100-card minimum at $358 makes a cheap experiment impossible, and the unlimited plan is bad value at low volume. It is also not a gifting platform, so if your real problem is that you do not have addresses or you need spend approvals, this solves neither. For a high-volume US sales, hospitality, or franchise operation with addresses in hand and a CRM to trigger from, it is the best-priced serious option on the board.
Read the full Simply Noted profileLob profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Simply Noted last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in Corporate Gifting & Direct Mail
18 trackedGifting and direct mail platforms send physical items, handwritten notes, and digital gift choices to prospects and customers, with address collection, spend controls, and CRM tracking built in.
Direct mail as an API call with address verification built in: the infrastructure much of the category quietly runs on.
The cheapest per-piece programmatic mail in the category at 73 cents a postcard, with a CDP-grade integration list.
Direct mail rebuilt for Shopify brands, with the design and audience matching done for you, became DTC's favorite retention channel this cycle.
Send a real gift to an email address and pay only if it is accepted, removing the address problem that made B2B gifting impractical.
Minutes to a first gift on the Essential plan, with recipients choosing their own item from a collection link, makes Snappy effortless for any sender.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Lob and Simply Noted?
Simply Noted's cheapest possible handwritten card is $0.84 plus $0.82 postage at 50,000 units; Lob's postcard is $0.615 including postage on a $550 plan with no minimum order. Simply Noted wins whenever the handwriting is the point, and only then. For transactional mail, notices, checks, or high-volume offers, Lob is cheaper, has real tracking events, and carries SOC 2 Type 2 that Simply Noted does not publish.
Is Lob or Simply Noted cheaper?
Lob starts at $0 per month with postcards at $0.905 each. Simply Noted starts at $2.76 per card (100-credit block, $358 all in with postage) (free trial). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Lob 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. Simply Noted pricing model: Prepaid card credits with published volume tiers, or a flat monthly rate for unlimited notes. Postage is charged separately at $0.82 per card at First-Class rates.
Does Lob or Simply Noted have a free plan?
Lob has a 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). Trial terms: No time-limited trial; the free Developer plan is the evaluation path and is a usable production plan. Simply Noted has no free plan. Trial terms: No free trial; free samples and a first-card offer for email subscribers let you judge the handwriting before buying a block.
Who should choose Lob?
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.
Who should choose Simply Noted?
Teams that already know handwritten mail works for them and send hundreds to thousands of cards a month, especially real estate, hospitality, insurance, mortgage, franchise, and B2B sales operations that want the per-card price driven down and the sends triggered from a CRM.
What are the best alternatives to Lob and Simply Noted?
SaaSTracker profiles 18 products in Corporate Gifting & Direct Mail. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Poplar (Best Value), PostPilot (Momentum), Goody (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
