Lob vs Stannp
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 assessmentStannp compared with Lob
Lob is the American infrastructure standard, with a better API, an eight-event tracking feed, cheque printing, and postcards at $0.905 free or $0.615 on a $550 plan, but it is US-centric and its plan ladder jumps from free to $260. Stannp posts from three countries, has a $12 tier, and never requires a sales call. US developer teams should take Lob; UK, Canadian, and cross-border senders should take Stannp.
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 Stannp if
Small and mid-sized businesses that want a real self-serve direct mail rate card with no sales call, especially UK, Canadian, and cross-border senders, and anyone whose volume sits in the awkward middle where a $200 monthly platform fee cannot be justified.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Lob | Stannp |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Gifting | Gifting |
| Starting price | $0 per month with postcards at $0.905 each (free plan available) | $0 per month, with a colour letter at $0.99 including postage (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. | Pay as you use with no minimum spend or contract, plus optional subscription tiers that buy down the per-piece rate. Per-piece prices include production, printing, postage, and mailing, with full colour standard and Economy Class postage included. Rates step down by volume band within each 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). | Free: $0 per month, no minimum spend, no contract, standard rates with a colour 8.5x11 letter at $0.99 including production, printing, postage, and mailing. |
| 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 plan is the evaluation path and sends real mail with no minimum spend |
| 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. | Small and mid-sized businesses that want a real self-serve direct mail rate card with no sales call, especially UK, Canadian, and cross-border senders, and anyone whose volume sits in the awkward middle where a $200 monthly platform fee cannot be justified. |
| 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. | Under an hour to a first send. Create an account in your region, upload a list, choose a format, see the calculator price, and dispatch. Connecting an integration adds an hour or so depending on the source system. |
| 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. The interface is a conventional campaign builder and the pricing calculator does most of the explaining. The subtleties worth learning are the volume bands, since a job sitting just under 1,000 or 10,000 pieces is often worth padding slightly to cross a band boundary. |
| Platforms | REST API, Web dashboard, Webhooks, HTML template engine | Web application, REST API, Regional US, UK, and Canadian storefronts, Over a thousand integrations, CSV upload |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type 2 (independently audited), HIPAA and HITECH support, Industry-standard encryption in transit and at rest | Postal standards in the US, UK, and Canada, Address verification against postal databases |
| Founded | 2013 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | United Kingdom origin, with US operations listed in Denver, Colorado and dispatch across the US, UK, and Canada |
| 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.
Stannp
Strengths
- The most graduated pricing ladder in the category, with a $12 tier that fills the middle-volume gap every American competitor leaves open.
- Genuine multi-country operation with dispatch from the US, UK, and Canada, which makes it the default option for non-US and cross-border small businesses.
- Pay as you use with no minimum spend and no contract on any tier, so mail can be seasonal without carrying a subscription through quiet months.
- Per-piece prices include production, printing, postage, and mailing with full colour as standard, so there is no hidden colour surcharge or separate postage invoice.
Limitations
- Postcard and self-mailer prices are not published in a static table and come out of an on-site calculator, so you cannot fully model a campaign before creating an account.
- Developer experience trails the API-first competitors. The API exists and works, but documentation sits in a knowledge base rather than a dedicated developer site with SDKs and test environments.
- No published compliance programme, no SOC 2, and no HIPAA coverage, so regulated healthcare and financial mail should go elsewhere despite the healthcare vertical page.
- No Certified Mail, no signed proof of delivery, and no cheque printing, which rules out legally significant and disbursement mail.
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.
Stannp
Pay as you use with no minimum spend or contract, plus optional subscription tiers that buy down the per-piece rate. Per-piece prices include production, printing, postage, and mailing, with full colour standard and Economy Class postage included. Rates step down by volume band within each plan.
- Free$0
- Starter$12
- Growth$48
- Premium$315
- EnterpriseCustom
Stannp's real advantage is not the lowest unit price, because Poplar and Lob both beat it on a US postcard. It is that the pricing ladder has rungs where the rest of the category has a cliff. A business sending 400 letters a month can pay $12 and get a volume rate, which at every American competitor would mean either staying on a free tier at the worst rate or paying $200-plus for a plan sized for someone ten times larger. Add multi-country dispatch, no minimum spend, and no contract, and this becomes the most flexible commercial structure in the category. Against a local print shop the maths at a thousand pieces is genuinely close, and the honest answer is that you are paying Stannp for address verification, automation triggers, and the fact that you never have to phone anyone.
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 profileStannp
Stannp is the most commercially sensible direct mail platform in this category for a business that is not American and not enormous. The pricing ladder is the point: a $12 tier that buys volume rates at 240 letters a month solves the exact problem every US competitor ignores, and pay-as-you-use with no minimum spend or contract means a seasonal sender is never carrying a subscription through quiet months. Multi-country dispatch from the US, UK, and Canada makes it the default for cross-border small businesses. What you give up is developer polish, published postcard rates, any compliance programme, and per-piece delivery proof, so regulated mail, legally significant notices, and engineering-heavy integrations all belong somewhere else. For everyone else running campaigns or operational mail on a real budget, this is the one to start with.
Read the full Stannp profileLob profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Stannp last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.