Stamps.com

I donated a bunch of items to my friend's auction to help with Cici's medical expenses. It was time to ship them as the payments came in. I didn't want to to go to the post office too many times and the shipping cost turned out to be a lot more than what I anticipated so I decided to take upon the trial offer of stamps.com. They advertise $25 in free postage and a free scale. At this point I was only interested in the free stamps.

I singed up and right away I was disappointed. They only give you $5 in postage during the trial period. The rest of the offer is also portioned out in the following months in $10 increments. Not only that but they charge $15.99/month after the 4 week trial period is over.

It IS very convenient to be able to print postage from my computer on anything; letters or even plain paper. However, is it really worth it? Let's do some math. In my case going to the post office would mean a 3 mile extra driving. My car's gas milage is about 25 MPG. With the current rounded up gas cost of $2.50/gallon that would cost me an extra 30 cents. I'd have to make 53 trips a month just to break even!

They do advertise some of the shipping to be cheaper but just for regular stamps on small packages I did not notice any cost savings. Perhaps if you have a busy eBay business then the trips and time savings would make it worth it. But for me, who only need stamps once in a while it is a waste of money. Needless to say I will cancel during the trial period after I mailed out all of my donations.

They also have a refer a friend program that could earn you $20 of free postage for each friend who remain a customer after the trial period. Your friend would have to use your code when signing up in order to have that amount credited to your account. My code is C-8RVG-DZT just in case you are interested. Although the chances are that by the time your trial period is over I already ceased to be a stamps.com customer.

Please post any comments you have on stamps.com. My disappointment was based on after only a day of using it. Maybe non-business customers can still find value in their service and I'd be interested to hear it.

Green factor: less gas used by printing your postage at home therefore reducing greenhouse effect.

Deal factor: not much after the trial month unless you ship a lot.