What EDDM Actually Costs in Charleston

Every Door Direct Mail is the United States Postal Service programme that lets a business mail every address on a carrier route without buying a list or holding a mailing permit. It is genuinely useful, and for some businesses it is the right answer. It is also consistently quoted at a price that leaves out most of what it costs.

This is the whole bill for a 5,000-piece EDDM campaign in the Charleston area, including the parts that do not appear on the USPS page.

The postage, which is the part everyone quotes

EDDM Retail postage runs about 26 cents a piece as of 2026. That is still a real saving against a first-class stamp and it is what makes the programme attractive. It is also, once everything else is counted, somewhere between a quarter and a half of what the campaign costs.

Two constraints come attached. You buy whole carrier routes, so your reach arrives in lumps of roughly 400 to 1,200 homes rather than a number you choose — asking for 5,000 homes can mean as few as four routes, and overshooting by a few hundred homes is normal rather than something you can trim. And there is a 5,000-piece daily cap per zip code on EDDM Retail, which matters if you were hoping to blanket Summerville in one go.

Printing, which is the part that surprises people

A 6.5x9 card — around the smallest that qualifies for EDDM — runs something like 15 to 25 cents a piece at 5,000 copies, on decent stock, printed both sides and delivered to you. Go up to a 9x12 and you are closer to 35 to 50 cents.

The cheaper sticker prices you will find online are quoted to people who already have a print-ready file, order on the printer’s schedule rather than their own, and pay shipping as a separate line. A business ordering one run, once, usually lands at the top of these ranges rather than the bottom — and a reprint for a file problem lands above them.

Order fewer than 5,000 and the per-piece price climbs steeply. Print is a setup-cost business; the first card costs nearly as much as the first thousand.

Design, which is either money or evenings

A designer who has laid out direct mail before will charge somewhere between $250 and $800 for a two-sided oversized card. You can do it yourself in Canva, and plenty of businesses do — but a card that looks homemade gets binned at the mailbox, and the postage was the same either way. This is the line item most likely to decide whether the campaign works at all.

The parts nobody costs at all

These are the lines that turn a tidy quote into a real bill. They are priced in the table below rather than waved at, because a guide that lists them and then leaves them out of its own total is doing the same thing it is complaining about.

• Bundling. EDDM pieces go in bundles of 50 to 100 with a facing slip on each. For 5,000 pieces that is 50 to 100 bundles, counted by hand, by somebody.
• The drop-off. Bundles go to the specific post office that serves the routes you selected — not the one nearest you. In a region this spread out that can be a real trip, and more than one if you picked routes across two offices.
• The paperwork. Forms per route, and a first attempt that gets sent back for a formatting problem is common enough to plan for.
• Reprints. Get the size or the indicia wrong and the post office will not take the mailing. That is the whole print run.

What it comes to

Everything above, for one 5,000-piece drop. Banding and processing assume you pay somebody; do it yourself and you trade the money for a day you do not get back.

So a mid-size card lands around 52 to 80 cents a household, and the 9x12 that actually gets noticed runs 72 cents to just over a dollar — and can reach $5,000 for a single drop before anybody has answered a phone.

None of that is a criticism of EDDM. It is the honest price of owning the whole card, and the postage line — the one everybody quotes — is a quarter to a half of it.

When EDDM is the right answer

Genuinely, sometimes it is. Solo EDDM beats a shared card when:

• You need the whole card. A grand opening, a menu, a multi-page offer — anything where a shared spot is too small to carry the message.
• Your area is not one of ours. If the homes you want are outside the zones we mail, no amount of cost advantage helps you.
• Your timing is exact. A shared card mails when the card mails. Solo mail goes when you want it to.
• Your budget is comfortable at $4,000 a drop and you would rather own every inch of the card than share it.

When it is not

A shared 9x12 card splits that same postage and printing between several businesses that do not compete with one another. A spot starts at $249 for a mailing to 5,000 homes — around five cents a household, with design, print and postage included and no bundling, no facing slips and no trip to the post office.

The honest trade is space and timing. You get a portion of the card rather than all of it, and it mails on the schedule for that zone. In exchange the cost per home drops by roughly a factor of eight, and the whole logistical tail disappears. For most local businesses running their first direct mail, that is the trade worth making — and if it works, the case for spending $3,000 on your own card gets much easier to make.

For the full comparison across both and everything in between, see direct mail cost per household, or the overview of how shared mailings work.

A note on these numbers

Postage and print prices move. The USPS rate changes at least annually and printers quote differently by volume, stock and season. Treat the figures here as the right order of magnitude and check the current USPS rate before committing — the shape of the answer holds even when the exact numbers shift.