USPS
Priority Mail Intl
10–15 days$18.30
$10.00 of taxes & duties included
all-in · no surprises
Built for hobby-to-side-business volume.
Your fee-free shipping desk.
A Stamps.com alternative for Etsy sellers
Your fee-free shipping desk.
For Etsy volumes, GoatLabels beats a Stamps.com subscription outright: no monthly fee, four carriers rate-shopped per parcel, and Billy AI drafting labels from order details.
Four carriers for odd-shaped parcels
Ceramics, tubes, bulky knits — USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL quote every parcel, and the weird shapes are where four quotes beat one.
all quoted Four quotes One all-in price each.
Quote = debit No later invoice.
Etsy sync Tracking pushed back.
Slow months cost nothing
Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto into a prepaid wallet — spent only when a label prints.
Prepaid Spent label by label.
No fee January bills zero.
Voids credited Back to the balance.
Side by side, at Etsy volume
GoatLabels vs Stamps.com, for a handmade shop.
The comparison changes shape at hobby volume: features matter less, and the fixed fee matters enormously. Here is where the two differ for a shop shipping dozens of parcels a month, not thousands.
| GoatLabels | Stamps.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost in a slow Etsy month | Zero. The wallet balance waits; nothing bills on the calendar. | The subscription bills whether five orders came in or none — see their pricing page for the current fee. |
| Cost per label at hobby volume | Just the rate-shopped all-in label price. Nothing amortises on top of it. | The fee divided by your label count rides on every parcel — at ten labels a month it is a real per-parcel number. |
| Getting Etsy orders in | The Etsy connector syncs orders into To Ship and pushes tracking back when you print. | Etsy import is supported inside their software. |
| The convention-stand sale | Paste the buyer's message or screenshot it — Billy drafts the label with no listing behind it. | Manual entry in the desktop workflow. |
| Carriers competing per parcel | USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL, each quoting one all-in price on every order. | Historically USPS-centred, with UPS added — check their site for current coverage. |
| Funding | Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto into one prepaid balance, spent label by label. | Subscription billing plus postage purchases. |
Stamps.com is a trademark of its owner and is not affiliated with GoatLabels. Etsy is a trademark of Etsy, Inc. Plans and carrier coverage change — compare against each company's current pages before you decide.
Three reasons handmade shops drop the subscription.
At Etsy volume, the fee IS the cost
Ship eight parcels a month and a postage subscription can add more per label than the difference between any two carriers. The single biggest saving available at hobby volume is not a cleverer rate — it is deleting the recurring fee entirely.
Handmade parcels are odd parcels
Ceramics, prints in tubes, bulky-but-light knits — exactly the shapes where a single carrier's rate table punishes you. Four carriers quoting every parcel means the mug and the tote bag each get their own cheapest path.
Your shop is bigger than your shop
Etsy is the storefront, but the craft-fair sale, the Instagram commission, and the repeat buyer who just DMs you are all real orders too. Billy drafts labels from a pasted message or a screenshot, so the off-Etsy half of your sales lives in the same queue.
And when Stamps.com is the right choice
- You mostly mail flats and envelopes — printed sheet postage for mail is Stamps.com's original strength, and parcels are our whole game.
- Your volume is high and steady enough that the subscription amortises to pennies per label and the desktop workflow is muscle memory.
- You need a mail class or carrier outside USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL — that is the honest list of what GoatLabels rate-shops.
An Etsy order's short trip
From sold to shipped between kiln loads.
The Etsy connector syncs each sale into the To Ship queue and pushes tracking back to the buyer when you print. The commission from Instagram and the craft-fair sale take the other door: paste the message or drop the screenshot, and Billy drafts the label and validates the address. Every parcel gets quoted against USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL, and the all-in price debits a prepaid wallet funded by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto — never a subscription.
1
Any order shape in
Etsy sync, DM, or screenshot
maya_boutique
Hey! 2x hoodies (M) 1x tee (L) 😅 Ship to: Maya R. Austin, TX 78701
Shopify
Synced into To Ship
TikTok Shop
Synced into To Ship
DM screenshot
- Order
- #1847
- Customer
- Jordan Lee
- Items
- 1x Hoodie (L)
- Address
- Brooklyn, NY
Drop the screenshot or paste the DM
Etsy syncs automatically; the fair sale and the DM commission get pasted in — one queue for all of it.
2 Billy AI
The studio assistant your fee never included.
- Reads a pasted message, a screenshot, or a spoken address
- Fills the addresses and the package details
- Validates the address before a cent is spent
- Rate-shops all four carriers and hands back a draft to confirm
Drafted. Checked. Yours to confirm.
3
Clean label out
Bought from the wallet
Paid from your prepaid balance
Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto
$12.47
Label purchased
USPS Priority Mail — all-in rate
$12.47
Tracking goes back to the Etsy buyer automatically. No monthly fee ever joins the ledger.
Etsy first. Everything else too.
A connector for the shop, AI for the fair table.
Etsy syncs into To Ship and gets tracking pushed back when you print — and so do Shopify, WooCommerce, and TikTok Shop if the side business grows sideways. The sales that never touch a storefront, from the market stall to the DM commission, go through Billy with nothing to connect.
Via AI tiles: a sale with no listing behind it still becomes a label.
13 connected today 2 via AI 8 coming soon
Connected today 13 storefronts sync to To Ship
Shopify 
Etsy 
WooCommerce 
TikTok Shop 
Amazon 
eBay 
Squarespace 
Wix 
Walmart 
Square 
BigCommerce 
Magento 
Temu Coming soon Shopify Plus Soon 
Zapier Soon 
NetSuite Soon 
Ecwid Soon 
Shein Soon 
ChannelAdvisor Soon 
SkuVault Soon 
Zoho Inventory Soon
Shopify Plus Soon Zapier Soon NetSuite Soon Ecwid Soon Shein Soon ChannelAdvisor Soon SkuVault Soon Zoho Inventory Soon Sized for a shop of one. Everything a handmade shop ships with.
Everything a handmade shop ships with.
Nothing a side business shouldn't pay for.
No seat fees, no software licence, no monthly minimum. The five features below are the ones that decide what an Etsy parcel actually costs and how long it takes to leave the studio.
One prepaid wallet,
five ways to fund it
Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH bank transfer, and crypto all top up the same balance, and every method buys identical rates, carriers, and features. Void a shipment and the credit lands back in the wallet.
Wallet balance
$1,247.36 USD
AI
Billy, for the orders
with no listing
A commission in the DMs, a sale at the fair table, a repeat buyer who just messages you — Billy reads a pasted message or a screenshot into a drafted, address-validated label. Included unlimited on Free.
Billy
LIVE
Where's the package to Maya?
It's in transit via UPS. Expected Friday, Aug 7.
1Z8923A6B05G4123456
In transit
Austin, TX → Dallas, TX
Ask Billy anything...
No fee riding on
every parcel
At hobby volume a subscription becomes a per-label surcharge you can see with simple division. Here the label price is the entire price, and a slow month bills nothing at all.
Shipment summary
UPS Ground $12.49
Insurance $0.75
Fuel surcharge $0.32
Total $13.56
Four carriers for
handmade shapes
USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL quote every parcel side by side. Odd-shaped and bulky-but-light packages — the handmade specialty — are exactly where the winning carrier changes parcel by parcel, and where a single default quietly overcharges.
Compare rates
UPS $12.48 FedEx $13.22 DHL $14.10 USPS $11.79
Duties & taxes paid
An API waiting,
if the shop grows
If the side business becomes the business, the REST API is already there: JSON, one Bearer header, idempotency keys, signed webhooks, unlimited calls on every plan. Nothing to migrate to later.
POST /v1/shipments
{
"to" : { "name" : "Maya" },
"from" : { "name" : "Alex" },
"service" : "ups_ground" ,
"label_format" : "pdf"
}
Webhook delivered
Label ready
CL-1038 · Brooklyn, NY
The studio has no desk for desktop software
Ship from the workbench.
Etsy sellers pack at the kitchen table, the studio bench, the fair booth — not at a desk with a postage meter. The queue, the four quotes, and the buy button all fit on the phone next to the tape gun.
Paste the DM, snap the thread, or drop the screenshot — Billy pulls the name, the address, and the parcel out of it.
No install and no desktop client: the browser is the whole product.
USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL come back as four all-in prices on one screen.
Buy from the prepaid balance and one-tap print to a share sheet or a thermal printer over Wi-Fi.
Hands covered in glaze? Hold the mic and say the address — Billy drafts it and reads the rate back.
Included on every plan
Tell Billy the order, keep your hands free.
Hold the mic, say who the parcel is going to, and Billy looks up the buyer, rate-shops USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL on the box in your hands, and queues the label against your prepaid balance. It remembers repeat buyers and saved box sizes — useful when half your sales are the same mug to different cities. This is the real product, not a render.
goatlabels.io/dashboard/shipments — Billy
Listening
"Where's Maya's package?"
Out for delivery
CL-1039 · Austin, TX · by 6 PM
Plain English in — names, addresses, weights, carriers, services · remembers repeat buyers and saved boxes · reads the all-in rate back before a cent leaves the wallet · phone, browser, or Telegram.
All-in quotes
The quote is the debit.
Three carriers on the same parcel, each an all-in number that is the exact amount leaving your prepaid balance — which matters when the margin on a hand-thrown mug is measured in single dollars. No adjustment invoice the day after, and a void credits the wallet, not a card statement three weeks out.
US → DE 2.6 lbs 12×8×4 in
Best balance
FedEx
Intl Connect Plus
3–5 days$22.80
$11.00 of taxes & duties included
all-in · no surprises
DHL
Express Worldwide
1–2 days$26.20
$12.20 of taxes & duties included
all-in · no surprises
No carrier invoice the day after Void → credit back to the wallet you funded Multi-currency display
Public API v1
Room to grow into, not a wall to hit.
Most Etsy shops will never call an API — and that is fine, because it costs nothing to ignore. But when the side business grows a website of its own, the same wallet that buys your Etsy labels answers REST calls: JSON, one Bearer header, idempotency keys, signed webhooks, unlimited calls on every plan.
Create, rate-shop, and buy — three calls, four carriers
Signed webhooks for tracking and label events instead of polling
Real idempotency keys — a retried request never buys two labels
OpenAPI 3.1 spec, no SDK lock-in, unlimited calls on every plan
Read the API docs Get an API key $0 on every plan
curl https://api.goatlabels.io/api/v1/shipments
201 Created · 187ms POST /api/v1/shipments
Authorization: Bearer sk_live_…
Idempotency-Key: ord_8421
{
"to": { "name": "Joyce", "city": "Berlin", "country": "DE" },
"parcel": { "weight": 1.2, "weight_unit": "kg" },
"service": "fedex_intl_priority"
}
Pricing sized for a side business
Free covers most Etsy shops whole.
Fifty shipments a month on Free is more than most handmade shops send, and the connectors, the API, and Billy are all unlimited underneath it — we make a little on each label instead of charging admission. Pro exists for the shops that outgrow that, with unlimited shipments and cheaper per-label pricing. Neither plan bills you for a month spent glazing instead of shipping.
Pro
Most popular $40 / month
Unlimited shipments — no monthly cap
Cheaper label pricing that scales down as your volume grows
Billy AI on Telegram — draft a label without opening the dashboard
API access still free and unlimited
Volume pricing
illustrative less volume more volume
more volume → lower per-label rates
Free
$0 / forever
A real shipping desk for a shop of one, with no subscription under it.
50 shipments a month, no monthly fee to print
USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL rate-shopped on every parcel
Etsy sync with tracking pushed back to the buyer
Billy AI in the web app, unlimited — paste, screenshot, or speak
REST API with unlimited calls; fund by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto
Billy is not a paid tier
The assistant that reads a DM, a screenshot, or a voice note into a drafted label runs unlimited in the web app on Free. Pro adds Billy on Telegram.
Web — every plan Telegram — Pro
API free on every plan
GET /api/v1/shipments
200 OK · plan: free
Unlimited calls on Free — still unlimited on Pro.
Bring the invoice you pay today
On Pro we will work with you to beat the label rates you are already getting from
Stamps.comShippoPirate Ship No contracts No monthly fee to print Start in seconds
Label prices are quoted live from USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL as one all-in number — the same number that leaves your wallet. Stamps.com's plans move, so compare against their current pricing page rather than a figure on ours. Full pricing details
The shapes of a handmade business
One shop, four kinds of orders.
An Etsy storefront is rarely the whole story. These are the four places a handmade shop's parcels actually come from — and all four land in the same queue here.
The Etsy storefront
Synced, tracked, done
Orders sync into To Ship, every parcel gets four carrier quotes, and tracking goes back to the buyer the moment you print. The storefront half of the shop runs itself.
4 carriers per quote tracking pushed back no monthly fee
goatlabels.io/dashboard/shipments
The seasonal rush
Holiday markets & drops
November triples and February disappears — the classic handmade curve. A prepaid wallet bends with it: fund the rush, print all week, and let the quiet months cost zero.
No fee in the quiet months
Order #1024 · the label price is the whole cost
Commissions in the DMs
The orders with no listing
could you make one in blue? ship to Austin?
Label drafted · CL-1024
The occasional overseas buyer
Duties inside the same number
DDP
duties prepaid, no surprise bill at the buyer's door
Real sellers, real words
Shops that ship without a subscription.
A video took off and I had 80 TikTok Shop orders by morning. I printed every label from my phone on the bus to the post office.
Early customer · TikTok
TikTok Shop seller
I run my Etsy shop from the kitchen. The AI reads the order, picks the carrier, the label prints. That's the whole workflow now.
Early customer · Etsy
Etsy maker
The API is what every shipping API pretends to be. Idempotency that actually works.
Sasha R.
Staff engineer, marketplace
Etsy sellers' Stamps.com questions
- Why is a no-fee platform better for an Etsy shop specifically?
- Because Etsy volume is usually low and uneven, and a flat monthly fee is at its worst under exactly those conditions: divided across a handful of labels it becomes a meaningful per-parcel cost, and in a slow month it bills against zero labels. GoatLabels charges only the rate-shopped label price, so cost tracks sales.
- Does GoatLabels connect to my Etsy shop?
- Yes. The Etsy connector syncs orders into the To Ship queue and pushes tracking back to the buyer when you print. Orders from outside Etsy — a fair, a DM, a commission — can be pasted or screenshotted into Billy and land in the same queue.
- How does it compare with Etsy's own labels?
- Etsy's built-in labels are convenient for the platform's default carriers. GoatLabels quotes USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL against every parcel and shows one all-in price per carrier, which matters most on the odd-shaped, bulky-but-light packages handmade goods tend to be.
- What does GoatLabels cost an Etsy seller?
- Nothing recurring. Fund a prepaid wallet with card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto and pay the all-in label price per parcel. Free covers 50 shipments a month — more than most Etsy shops ship — with Billy and the connectors included.
- Do I get discounted rates without a subscription?
- Yes. Discounted commercial rates are quoted on every plan, including Free, across all four carriers — and four carriers competing on each parcel often beats any single carrier's discount table on the shapes handmade sellers ship.
- What about the orders that don't come through Etsy?
- Paste the message or drop a screenshot and Billy drafts the label — name, address, parcel — and validates the address before you buy. A market-stall sale and an Etsy order end up as the same kind of label in the same queue.
- Can I switch mid-month without losing anything?
- Yes. There is no fee on the GoatLabels side, so trying it while a Stamps.com billing cycle runs out costs nothing extra. Ship a few real orders, compare the totals, and cancel the subscription once the numbers have convinced you — our guide at /how-to-cancel-stamps-com covers that step.
More on shipping an Etsy shop: shipping labels for Etsy covers the connector in depth. Weighing the fee itself? Read what the monthly fee actually buys, the cancellation guide, or the general no-monthly-fee alternative page.
Try it on the next parcel that sells.
Keep the craft.
Drop the subscription.
Connect your Etsy shop or paste the next DM commission, fund a wallet with card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, or crypto, and buy the cheapest all-in rate of four carriers — with nothing billing in the months the kiln is busier than the mailbox.
Sign up in seconds. No card required. No monthly fee.