Carrier API Pricing 2026: What 7 Platforms Charge

Seven vendors, seven pricing pages, seven different ways of hiding the number that actually matters: what you pay per label once you're past the demo. This benchmark pulls figures directly from vendor pricing and billing docs for EasyPost, Shippo, Sendcloud, ShipStation API (formerly ShipEngine), Easyship, nShift, and Cargoson, collected in July 2026. Where a vendor won't publish a number, we write "Not published." No estimates, no "starting from" guesses borrowed from a reseller site.

Why carrier API pricing pages don't tell you the real number

Because usage-based pricing makes the sticker price meaningless without a volume assumption. A "$0/month" free tier and a "$20/month" base fee both look cheap until you multiply by your actual label count, and every vendor draws the free-tier line in a different place. That's a procurement problem as much as a DX one: an integration engineer defending a platform choice needs the per-label cost at their real volume, not the marketing tier name.

Method: every figure below traces to a vendor pricing page, billing FAQ, or support article, checked in July 2026. We did not use third-party "pricing tracker" sites as a source for any number in the table, though a few are cited later where they illustrate how much vendor pricing pages disagree with each other. Carrier-side postage (USPS, UPS, FedEx rate cards), VAT variants, and annual-billing discounts are out of scope unless the vendor states them directly.

The pricing table: base fee, per-label fee, free tier

The pattern splits into two camps: per-label consumption pricing (EasyPost, Shippo, Sendcloud, ShipStation API, Easyship) and flat subscription pricing (Cargoson). nShift publishes no self-serve number at all.

A few specifics worth calling out. The following pricing applies to shipments billed through the EasyPost Wallet: Label usage is free for the first 3,000 labels per month, and beyond this threshold each additional label is $0.08. Beyond that free tier, the BYOCA fee is $20 per month, plus $0.08 per label.

Shippo's free tier is smaller and its Pro pricing is where sources genuinely conflict. The Starter Plan is the default plan when creating your Shippo account, a great plan for smaller businesses shipping less than 30 labels per month with no monthly commitment. Shippo's own support documentation gives one number for the entry Pro tier: if you selected the $19 per month plan for up to 200 labels monthly, you would be charged $19. A separate aggregator citing the live pricing page instead reports Pro scales with your business through six volume tiers, ranging from $17/month for 1–200 labels to $199/month for 5,001–10,000 labels. That's a $2/month gap on the entry tier between two sources checked within weeks of each other, which is exactly the kind of pricing-page drift this benchmark exists to flag.

Sendcloud is the messiest of the seven to pin down. Its own pricing page states the label fee schedule directly: the label processing fee depends on your subscription plan: Lite (+£0.09 per label), Growth (+£0.08 per label), Premium (+£0.07 per label), and Pro (+£0.06 per label). But the plan subscription prices themselves vary wildly depending on which secondary source you read, from Growth at roughly €70-109/month to Premium at roughly €138-219/month. We could not resolve this discrepancy against Sendcloud's own page inside the scope of this check, so treat any Sendcloud monthly subscription figure you see quoted elsewhere as unverified until you get a quote.

ShipStation API publishes plan structure but not price. The Advanced Plan is available with 1,000, 5,000 or 10,000 API calls per month to each of order imports, create labels, track parcels, validate addresses, rate shopping and PUDO searches, with pay-as-you-go usage beyond that, or contact sales for volumes over 25,000 per month. No dollar amount for any of the three Advanced tiers appears on the public pricing page in our check, so that's "Not published" rather than a guess.

Easyship keeps the free tier straightforward. Easyship's free tier supports up to 50 shipments per month with core features including order sync, label generation, tracking, and email support. Paid tiers start at the Plus tier at $29 per month, fitting growing e-commerce stores needing checkout rate display and automation.

nShift doesn't play this game at all. Its own pricing page says as much: nShift offers simple, clear and predictable pricing on all our services and integrations, viewable on request. In practice that means every self-serve number defaults to "Not published," confirmed independently: the provider does not communicate any price information, which is a common practice for software vendors and service providers.

Cargoson runs the opposite model entirely. Instead of per-label consumption, the Cargoson price comes in the following plans: the Retail plan starting at €199/month, the Industry plan from €299/month, the Corporation plan at €499/month, and a Custom plan available upon request for tailored pricing. A separate Cargoson blog post on its own site confirms the fixed-fee structure at the higher tiers: fixed monthly subscriptions include the Industry plan at €299/month for 3,000 shipments and the Corporation plan at €499/month for 5,000 shipments, with no per-shipment fees or hidden charges. For teams modeling total cost of ownership rather than a bare per-shipment rate, that's a meaningfully different shape of bill than the consumption-based platforms above it in this table.

Hidden fees that don't show up in the headline number

Every consumption-priced platform in this set has at least one fee that lives off the main pricing page. Knowing where to look before you sign a contract saves a budget-review argument later.

• EasyPost charges a wallet-funding surcharge: wallet loads via credit card carry a 3.75% convenience fee, avoidable by using ACH transfers.
• EasyPost insurance is priced separately from the label fee: shipping insurance costs $1.00 per label for up to $100 of coverage.
• EasyPost standalone tracking and rating overage stack on top of the per-label fee: USPS standalone trackers cost $0.03 per unique tracker not tied to an EasyPost shipment, non-USPS trackers cost $0.02, and shipment rating overage is $0.02 per shipment rated beyond 3x the number of labels purchased.
• Shippo bills postage on a separate cycle from the subscription: postage charges fire when you hit $100 in accumulated labels or every 7 days, whichever comes first, with new accounts starting at a lower $25 threshold for the first charge.
• Sendcloud's overage fee outlasts your plan tier: after exceeding the monthly label limit for your plan, you pay an additional £0.15 per label on top of the original per-label fee.

None of these show up in the top-line "starting at" figure vendors lead with. Model them separately if you're forecasting spend at more than a few hundred labels a month.

Recent pricing changes worth flagging

EasyPost restructured its plan defaults earlier this year, and the change matters if you have an account sitting on autopilot. Reporting on the rollout describes it this way: EasyPost rolled out a new two-plan pricing structure starting February 23, 2026, and if no plan was selected before the cutover, an account could be automatically enrolled in a $20/month plan or lose access to shipping label generation. That's a third-party account rather than an EasyPost announcement we could independently verify with a date-stamped changelog entry, so treat the exact date as reported-but-unconfirmed and check your own dashboard notice rather than this article.

Separately, ShipEngine is mid-rebrand. The rebrand of ShipEngine as ShipStation API is described by Auctane as the start of the product's next phase of API tooling, and existing integrations are unaffected: no, your API integrations will continue working as usual, with all existing endpoints remaining functional. The pricing page URL and structure moved; the endpoints didn't.

What this means for cost modelling at scale

At low volume, free tiers decide the shortlist. At 30 labels a month, Shippo's Starter plan and EasyPost's Wallet Carriers are both effectively $0. At 3,000 labels a month, EasyPost's Wallet Carriers plan is still free at the exact threshold, while Sendcloud's 50-label free tier and Shippo's 30-label free tier have long since converted to paid. Easyship's free tier caps out even earlier, at up to 50 shipments per month, matching Sendcloud's ceiling almost exactly.

Past the free tier, the two pricing philosophies diverge hard. EasyPost and Shippo charge per label on top of a small or zero base fee, so cost scales roughly linearly with volume once you're past the free allotment (with the caveat that Shippo's Pro and EasyPost's BYOCA plans both waive or reduce the per-label charge at a flat monthly cost). Cargoson instead charges a fixed monthly fee regardless of shipment count within the plan's scope, which only pays off once volume is high enough that a per-label model would cost more than the flat rate. Where you cross that line depends entirely on your real label count, so run the two models against your last three months of actual volume before committing rather than extrapolating from the vendor's example numbers.

What we can't model responsibly: nShift's enterprise pricing, Sendcloud's exact subscription tier costs given the source conflict noted above, ShipStation API's Advanced tier dollar figures, and Cargoson's Custom tier. All four are "Not published" by design, and any number you see quoted for them elsewhere should be treated as a third party's estimate, not a vendor commitment.

Methodology and what's not covered

Figures were pulled from vendor pricing and billing pages between May and July 2026, primarily EasyPost's pricing page, Sendcloud's pricing page, and the equivalent pages for Shippo, ShipStation API, Easyship, nShift, and Cargoson. This benchmark excludes carrier-side postage rate cards (USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL), regional VAT variants, and annual-billing discounts except where a vendor states them directly on the pricing page. It does not cover DHL, DSV, or DB Schenker direct APIs, which don't publish self-serve pricing at all and would need a separate benchmark built on quote data rather than public pages.

If you've got a more current vendor quote than what's listed here, especially for Sendcloud's disputed subscription tiers, get in touch and we'll fold it into the next revision. Pricing is the variable these vendors change most often and least visibly, so re-check the live page before you sign anything longer than a month-to-month contract.