Billy is the AI shipping assistant built into GoatLabels: you hand it an order as pasted text, a screenshot, or a voice note, and it drafts a shipping label — recipient, address, package details — that you review, rate-shop across USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL, and buy from your prepaid wallet. Billy is included on every plan, and it never purchases anything on its own: every draft waits for your confirmation before money moves.

What is Billy and what exactly does it draft?

Most shipping software assumes your orders arrive as structured data — a store connector or a tidy CSV. Billy exists for the orders that don't. A DM deal, a live-sale claim, an invoice someone emailed you, a voice memo you record while packing: Billy turns any of them into the same thing, a structured draft label inside GoatLabels.

Concretely, a draft contains the recipient's name and address (validated at quote time, with a residential/commercial badge), the package details Billy could extract or that you've saved as defaults, and — on international orders — a drafted customs description for each item. From the draft, one tap quotes all four carriers with one all-in price each, including any insurance or signature fee you toggle on. That draft-then-review pattern is the core of AI shipping labels on GoatLabels: the AI does the typing, you keep the judgment calls.

What Billy is not: an autopilot. It doesn't pick your carrier, doesn't submit customs on its own authority, and doesn't spend a cent without you.

Which inputs does Billy accept: paste, screenshot, or voice?

Three input modes, one output. Use whichever matches where the order lives:

Paste is fastest when the order is already text. Copy the buyer's message — "Sara Kim, 402 Birch Ave Apt 2, Portland OR 97214, wants the medium hoodie" — and paste it into the Billy chat. Messy, conversational text is fine; that's the point.

Screenshot is for orders trapped inside an app. Order pages, DM threads, invoices — Billy reads the image directly, so platforms without connectors are no obstacle. The details, including which screenshots parse well and which fail, are in our deep dive on labels from screenshots.

Voice is for when your hands are full of packing tape. Dictate the order — name, address, weight, what's in the box — and Billy structures it. There's a knack to phrasing a clean dictation, covered in voice to shipping label.

Here's how the three modes shake out on real orders, and what stays on your side of the desk regardless of input:

Input	Example order	What Billy drafts	What you verify before buying
Paste	Buyer's DM text with name and address	Recipient, parsed address, item notes	Address completeness (unit numbers!), weight, service choice
Screenshot	Etsy order page or Instagram thread	Recipient, address, visible items	Cut-off fields, weight, rate selection
Voice	Dictated: "2 lb box to Jamie Ortiz, 88 Pine St, Austin TX 78701"	Recipient, address, stated weight	Spellings of names/streets, ZIP, service choice
Any, international	Screenshot of an overseas order	All of the above, plus customs descriptions	HS code, declared value, origin country — always yours

What does Billy never do without you confirming first?

The boundaries are deliberate, and they're the same on every plan:

Billy never buys the label. Every purchase is your explicit confirmation on a quoted price. The wallet — funded by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto — moves only when you say so.
Billy never picks the carrier for you. It surfaces the four all-in quotes; the speed-versus-cost call is yours. Insurance and signature requirements are per-shipment toggles you set, with fees folded into the quote.
Billy never fabricates package details. No weight in the input means the draft uses your saved defaults or flags the field. Guessed weights are how sellers earn carrier billing adjustments, so Billy doesn't guess.
Billy never assigns HS codes. On international orders it drafts the customs description only — the tariff classification is a legal declaration that stays with you.

If you've used AI tools that hallucinate confidently, this design will read as restraint. It is. A shipping label is money and a legal document; the AI's job is to eliminate the typing, not the accountability.

How does Billy handle customs descriptions on international orders?

International orders add a customs form: item description, declared value, origin country, and HS code per item. Billy's contribution is the description — from "the blue ceramic mug from my shop" it drafts a clean, customs-appropriate line like "ceramic drinking mug." Descriptions are where most small sellers stall, so this is a real time-saver.

The rest is yours by design. You supply the HS code, declared value, and origin country, because those are declarations with legal and duty consequences that an AI should not be making for you. To keep repeat products fast, GoatLabels supports saved customs templates: build the full item entry once — description, HS code, origin, value — and reuse it on every future shipment of that product. For a shop with a stable catalog, the second international order is dramatically faster than the first.

Is Billy included on the free plan?

Yes — paste, screenshot, and voice drafting all work on the Free plan, which has no monthly fee and no minimum. You pay for labels from your prepaid wallet and nothing else.

The optional $40/mo Pro plan doesn't unlock Billy; it upgrades the economics and the access: unlimited shipments, cheaper label rates, and Billy on Telegram, so you can fire orders at the assistant from the same app your buyers DM you on. Whether Pro pays for itself is a volume question — the pricing page lays out both plans side by side. The honest rule of thumb: start Free, and let your monthly label spend tell you when Pro's cheaper rates cover the fee.

Where does Billy save the most time in a real shipping day?

The gains cluster in three places:

The unstructured pile. Every seller has orders that live outside their store: DMs, comment claims, a friend-of-a-friend order by text. Pre-Billy, each one meant retyping an address into a form while flipping between apps — the highest-friction labels of the day. Post-Billy, they're a screenshot each.

The phone-only stretch. Packing at the kitchen table, at the post office drop-off, between lives — Billy's chat works from your phone, so drafting, quoting, and buying don't wait for a desktop session.

The batch after a spike. Twenty orders after a good live or a viral post is where per-order seconds compound. Screenshot, confirm, buy; screenshot, confirm, buy. The review step stays — it's your protection — but the typing is gone, and typing was most of the job.

What Billy doesn't accelerate: your actual packing, and orders already flowing cleanly through store sync (Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, TikTok Shop), which never needed retyping in the first place. Billy's territory is everything the connectors can't see.

FAQ

Is Billy a chatbot or a shipping tool? Both, in the useful sense: you talk to it like a chat, but its output is always a concrete draft label inside GoatLabels — not advice, an artifact you can rate-shop and buy.

Does Billy work with orders from Amazon, Whatnot, or Mercari? There are no connectors for those platforms, but Billy is the workaround by design: screenshot or paste the order and it drafts the label the same as any other input.

Can Billy ship internationally? Yes. It drafts the customs description from your item details; you supply the HS code, declared value, and origin country, and saved customs templates make repeat products a one-tap fill.

What happens if Billy gets a detail wrong? You catch it at the review step — every field is editable before purchase, and address validation runs at quote time. Nothing is bought until you confirm, so a bad extraction costs you an edit, not money.

Do I need Pro to use voice input? No. Paste, screenshot, and voice are all included on Free. Pro adds unlimited shipments, cheaper rates, and Billy on Telegram for $40/mo.