![]() This may be economically viable if you are mailing LOTS of letters and/or packages each month, but if you are a more casual user for whom the Endicia system is a convenience, be aware that the cost for that convenience is a nearly 50% premium on every stamp you use. You can get around this if you sign up for Endicia's monthly service, paid for by a monthly fee. Often these vendors don't mention this fact, or hide it in the questions section on other pages. Thus, your off brand labels cannot be used. Beware! Endicia has closed off that supposedly free market competition route by imposing a requirement that when you put a new roll of stamps into your printer, you enter a special code which THEY print on each roll of THEIR labels, but is not available from the off brand seller. Go on Amazon and you will find LOTS of companies offering to sell you rolls of as many as 700 blanks per roll and at prices of $10-15 per roll. In other words, you are paying about 66 cents every time you mail a standard letter at 46 cents. ![]() Today, one Endicia roll of 200 stamp blanks costs about $40 meaning that printing one stamp costs you not only the current 46 cents for the postage, BUT another roughly 20 cents for the label itself. The problem? As in so many things, the inexorable rise in the costs of this service. Once that is expended, I will discontinue my account and once again use the Post Office for supplies. Now my "cache" of Endicia-brand stamps is slowly running out and I will be on the last roll shortly. I knew I was paying a bit more than the cost of actual stamps, and they got the float on my paid balance until it was used up, but felt the trade off with not having to go to the post office all the time was worth it. I joined Endicia a long while back and when I first signed up, was able to get a ten-roll pack of stamp labels from them at a reasonably decent price. Their real money is in selling you the stamp labels. The old adage about selling razors cheap because the real money is in selling the blades, clearly applies to Endicia. Pricing customers out of the market/blocking competition I am beyond furious with them, after having spent money on a printer we own, on genuine stamps that we paid for and own, and after years of use and thousands of dollars spent on their online postage, the equipment locks itself out because it thinks we're fraudulent users. So using deductive logic, their company policy is dictated solely by greed. The funny thing is, if you're a monthly subscriber to their plan, they never ask you for the activation code. Endicia's phone support was - of course - closed for the day, and being a Friday, we had to wait until Monday morning to get an answer. Just the kind of dependable company postage solution we could expect. This happened on a day when we needed to mail dozens of important legal documents, and had no way to print the correct postage. As such - our printer simply "locked itself" to prevent fraud. Can you read the code on the right side? Neither could we. In our case, this code was simply not legible (see attached photo). Third, be aware that during random times throughout the year, Endicia will decide that you may not be using their "genuine" stamps, and will ask you for an activation code. This is absolutely one of the poorest product designs, and probably implemented for a reason, to get you to buy more stamps from them. ![]() We must've wasted dozens of stamps this way. Another major issue with this crummy printer is that everytime you go to "tear" leftover paper, it triggers the feed mechanism, essentially feeding you a blank stamp (10 cents wasted every time). You're essentially paying 10 cents PER STAMP, in addition to the postage you'll be printing on it. With this in mind, know that the Endicia paper rolls are the only rolls approved by the almighty U.S. The roll of stamps is just a paper, and the value of the postage you print on it is paid-for separately, through your online account. This is separate from the online postage that you have to purchase. First, be aware that you can only use "approved" rolls of stamps to print on. I've been using this printer for years, and have spend thousands on online postage through Endicia. After thousands of dollars spent, they locked my account.
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