Painless Postage
Run Your Postage Needs without Paying Fees
Personally I find postage stamps a royal pain in the ankle, two joints up and around the corner. I have to mail a letter out and in the construction zone I call a home office I cannot find the little booklet of stamps.
Occasionally I have to send something out like a parcel. This has meant a trip to the post office, standing in line and otherwise wasting my time when I could be doing work that pays money.
I looked at several companies that offer online postage management and purchase. I was not happy because their monthly fees are at least USD10 a month and go up from there. So much of my work is online and digital I cannot justify spending that kind of money for my minor postage needs.
I found a solution from Dymo with Http://dymostamps.com . They have a very elegant answer and the only downside is you have to be running Microsoft Windows, not Linux not OS X.
Priority mail and express mail supplies delivered to your door for free
Signing up for an account was very easy. I was impressed with their security. Instead of using passwords they use passphrases which are much more secure. When I set my account I created a temporary passphrase which they reminded me of what it was when they sent me my verification email.
Once you install the software you create a new passphrase.
At less than eight cents per postage label, it’s cheaper than going to the post office
Certainly they want to sell you a label printer for your postage. While I have a perfectly good multi function laser printer that sees maybe 15 pages of printing a year. So I was not thrilled with having to spend USD200 for a label printer that would get even less usage.
Apparently there thinking of people like me because they sell sheet labels that hold 24 blank pieces of postage per sheet. I was able to order online via my account a package with eight of the sheets for $14.95. That comes out to about 7.8 cents on top of the cost of the postage.
Their software is very slick. I can point at a particular blank on the screen and say from the drop-down menu I am mailing X. if I select a standard envelope it comes out with the correct postage. And the same goes for the variety of priority mail envelopes and boxes.
They even made it easy for me to ask for priority mail supplies to be brought to my door. I certainly cannot begrudge the company making a small profit selling me the post office approved blank labels. At eight cents per item going out the door and just handing it to my postman is a heckuva time and money saver not running down to the post office.
No monthly fees and being able to manage shipping my parcels and paying my bills without having to leave the home office is a great feeling.
by 
Category: Software
About the Author (Author Profile)
Tcat began his digital journey in the mid 1960's with his father on a GE-225 mainframe with a 'whopping' 8 KB of RAM using the '80 card' and a 4-bit paper tape programs written with a Flexowriter. After the SE Asia 'conflict' the US Army no longer required his service as a in the 9th Signal Corps as a photographer and assigned him to 9th Finance, 9th Inf. because he could spell the word 'computer' and actually knew what it meant. Being transferred to Ft. Lewis, WA and building an Altair computer brought him to the U of WA and a few folks from Lakeside Hight School which formed a company called Micro Soft (then 2 words). Fast forward 20 years and the industry came across the idea of certification since a collage degree could not measure the speed at which things changed. Playing the game, Tim CATura-Houser earned 50+ certification titles in a few short years. Of all of them, he sees Certified Technical Trainer (1997) as his best moment of life. As a full-time author and teacher he became frustrated with being confused with Tim O'Reilly and in the year 2000 had his name legally changed to Tcat Houser. Today he is still a 'digital globe trotting warrior' writing and teaching on all things digital (and sometimes analog) electronic. When not working 'electronics', he enjoys attempting to replicate the local cuisines he has sampled around the world.Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Quick update.
The labels we’re shipped the same day of order, arrived within 2 days.
Amazon has a decent scale for ~$20 for box weighing. I did get it yet as any boxes for now I will probably ship via Priority mail so the post man has to come to me to get them. The whold point of this piece was to eliminate that Post Office Trip.
And if you need to do 3rd class or media mail the scale looks like a great investment.