How Much to Charge Per Ad Spot: Real Pricing From 76 Community Cards

What does a community card ad spot sell for?

The median ad spot on a community card sells for $477 per mailing. A quarter of spots go for under $250. A quarter sell above $810.

Those aren't survey numbers or what somebody told me on a call. They come from 76 live operator websites across 81 markets — the actual prices operators set on their own cards.

Measure	Lower quartile	Median	Upper quartile
Per ad spot, per mailing	$250	$477	$810
Per ad spot, per month	$250	$450	$720

Two more numbers worth having in your head: the median drop is 2,500 pieces, and the median card carries 14 ad spots.

Why the range is so wide

A $250 spot and an $810 spot are both "normal." That spread isn't noise — it's four things moving at once.

How many homes you're hitting. This is the big one. A spot on a 2,500-piece drop and a spot on a 10,000-piece drop are different products. Advertisers are buying reach, and they know it.

How big the spot is. Most cards run a standard size and a double. The double usually runs 1.5–2x the standard, not 2x flat — you're selling attention, and attention doesn't scale linearly with square inches.

Whether they're buying one drop or six. Almost every operator discounts multi-drop commitments. That's where the per-mailing and per-month distinction starts to matter, and it's where most new operators confuse themselves. More on that below.

What the route is worth. A card going into a dense, high-income, owner-occupied neighborhood supports a higher price than one going into a transient market. Same postcard, different asset.

The mistake: treating the median as your price

$477 is the middle of a market, not a recommendation. If you set your price at the median because the median exists, you've done the same thing as pricing off a competitor's website — you've outsourced your pricing to strangers whose routes you've never seen.

Work from your own numbers instead.

Start with cost per home reached. Take your spot price and divide by your drop size. At the medians — $477 on a 2,500-piece drop — that's roughly 19¢ per home. That's arithmetic on two medians rather than a measured figure, so treat it as a reference point, not a law. But it's the number that makes sense to an advertiser, because it's the number they can compare to everything else they buy.

Then sanity-check it against what they're replacing. A local business weighing your card against a solo EDDM drop is comparing your $477 to their $1,800 all-in for design, printing, and postage on a mailing that reaches the same homes. You are not the expensive option. Operators who forget this undercharge for years.

Per mailing or per month? Pick one and be consistent

This tripped up enough operators in the data that it's worth calling out: about a third of the sites I looked at price by month, and the rest price by mailing.

If you mail monthly, they're the same thing and it doesn't matter.

If you mail every six weeks, or quarterly, or "when the card fills," they are absolutely not the same thing — and if your website says "$450/month" while you actually mail five times a year, you have built a billing dispute into your own pricing page.

Say what the advertiser gets. "$450 per mailing, and we mail monthly" is unambiguous. "$450/month" is only unambiguous if you genuinely mail every month, every time.

How to price your first card

You don't have renewal data or a track record yet, so price on reach and be willing to move.

1. Set your drop size first. Everything else keys off it. 2,500 is the median for a reason — it's big enough to matter to an advertiser and small enough to fill.
2. Price your standard spot between 15¢ and 25¢ per home. On a 2,500-piece drop that's roughly $375–$625, which sits right around the middle of the market.
3. Price your double at about 1.7x the standard, not 2x.
4. Offer a multi-drop discount, not a lower base price. Three drops at 15% off is a better business than a permanently cheap card. It sets your renewal up on the first call.
5. Leave the first two spots cheap on purpose. Founding-advertiser pricing on your first card buys you proof, and proof is worth more than the $200 you gave up.

Has community card pricing gone up?

No — and this surprised me.

Sites launched in 2025 run a median of $467 per spot per mailing. Sites launched in 2026 run $450. Essentially flat.

That's useful in two directions. If you're pricing a first card, last year's numbers are still a fair guide. And if someone tells you rates are climbing and you need to move now, the data doesn't support it.

What about 9x12 versus 6x11?

I don't have a defensible answer yet, so I'm not going to give you one.

Most of the sites in this dataset predate the field that records card format, which leaves too few 6x11 data points to compare honestly. The moment that sample is big enough, I'll publish it — including if it says something inconvenient.

What I can tell you from running cards rather than from the data: 6x11 is a smaller, cheaper drop, which usually means a lower spot price and a lower barrier for advertisers who balk at four figures.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure here is aggregated from 76 community card operator websites built on 9x12tools, spanning 81 distinct markets.

Sites still carrying the platform's default pricing are excluded — otherwise I'd be quoting my own defaults back at you and calling it market data. Churned and active operators are both included, because restricting it to current subscribers would bias the whole thing toward whoever happens to still be paying me. Per-mailing and per-month pricing are reported separately and never blended. No individual site, operator, or city is identified.

You can see the full methodology on the 9x12 method guide.

I update these numbers as the sample grows. If you're running a card and your pricing looks nothing like this, that's worth knowing too — you might be leaving money on the table, or you might be in a market the median doesn't describe.