Is there a yearly price?
Yes. Paying annually costs ten months rather than twelve, so a year is $970 on Founding Operator, $1,490 on Operator and $2,490 on Scale. It is the same product either way — the only thing that changes is how often you are billed.
What does it cost to get started?
Nothing. You create an account, build the card, pick your routes and price your spots without entering a payment method. A plan only starts when you publish the campaign and turn on checkout — the point at which the site can actually take an advertiser's money.
How do I know who to call?
The platform tells you. The moment you save your EDDM routes it searches the businesses in your mail area across the categories that buy 9x12 spots, scores each one, grades them against each other and hands you a ranked queue with the reasoning attached — no form, no button to find. Your first ten leads are fully workable for free; turning on payments unlocks the rest.
Where do the leads come from, and are they any good?
They come from Google Places, searched by category against the routes you selected — so they are the real businesses operating in the area your card mails to, not a bought list. Each one is scored on review count, rating, whether it has a website and a phone number, and whether that category historically buys community card spots. The grade is a percentile within your own campaign's pool rather than an absolute bar: an A means 'call this one before the others', and the reason is printed on the card so you can disagree with it. We also read each business's own website once to find a contact email and their social profiles.
Is the lead grading actually useful, or is it a scraped list with letters on it?
It is a ranking, and it is only as good as its inputs — which is why every grade shows its reasoning instead of just a letter. It is genuinely useful for the thing it claims to do: deciding who to call first out of forty-seven businesses you have never heard of. It is not a substitute for qualifying. An operator who knows their town will overrule it, and should — the queue is a starting order, not a verdict.
Who chases the advertiser for their approval?
Nobody has to. When a spot sells, the advertiser gets a private link to their own workspace — no account to create and no password to set. You send their ad there for approval, they open it and either approve it or ask for a change, and the answer is recorded against the spot. The card itself then shows you which squares are cleared for your printer and which are still waiting on somebody, so the week before a mail date stops being a list of people you have to remember to text. They can also update their details, add their own artwork if they have some, or cancel from the same link.
Do I need to be technical?
No. You answer a handful of questions about your city, your card and your prices, and the site is built for you. There is nothing to install, host or update. If you can fill out a form on your phone you can run a campaign.
What does it cost my advertisers?
Nothing beyond the price you set. Payments run through your own Stripe account at Stripe's standard rate, and we take zero percent on top. The money is yours before it is ever ours.
What if I do not have a Stripe account?
Then one is created for you, and it is yours. Switching on payments hands you to Stripe's own onboarding, where you enter your business details and the bank account you want the money to land in. What comes out the other side is a full Stripe account in your name — not a sub-account of ours — with its own dashboard you can log into without us. If you already have a Stripe account, you connect that one instead and nothing about how you use it changes. You do not need to have taken a card payment before to run a card.
Do I have to give you my Stripe API keys?
No, and it is worth being wary of any tool that asks. You connect your own Stripe account through Stripe's own onboarding, so we never see a key and there is nothing of yours for us to store or lose. Charges are created directly on your account, you keep a full Stripe dashboard, and you can disconnect us from it whenever you like without asking us to delete anything. A Stripe secret key is unrestricted access to an entire account — Stripe itself no longer recommends handing one out — and payments is exactly the place to hold a tool to that standard.
What if an advertiser wants to pay me by check?
Mark the spot sold yourself. It shows as sold on the card and in your ledger, tagged as a direct sale so you can always tell the two apart. Nothing forces a payment through the platform.
Can I run more than one city?
Yes. Each campaign keeps its own routes, mail date, card and money, and they all report into one dashboard. How many can be selling at once is the only thing your plan decides — and there is never a per-city fee.
Do I have to use a particular printer?
No, and that is not going to change. You keep whatever printer you already use — the card builder exports a print-ready file with bleed and safe zones handled, and the USPS paperwork for your routes prints alongside it. We intend to offer print and mail from inside the product eventually, so a sold-out campaign can order its own run without re-entering anything. That is on the roadmap rather than in the product today, and it will be an option rather than a requirement.
Whose customers are these — mine or yours?
Yours. Your domain, your Stripe account, your advertiser list, exportable whenever you want. We are the tooling underneath your business, not a middleman standing in it.
I already have a site somewhere else. Can I move?
Yes, and you keep your domain — you point it at your new campaign site and it carries on working, so nothing you have printed or handed out goes dead.
Can I cancel?
Any month, from your billing settings. Campaigns that already sold spots stay readable and your advertiser records stay exportable — cancelling stops new selling, it does not lock you out of your own history.