Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) is a USPS program that lets you mail a printed piece to every address on a postal carrier route without buying a mailing list, addressing the pieces, or holding a mailing permit. You pick routes on a map, print a flat-sized piece, and the mail carrier delivers one to every door on the route as part of their normal walk. Because there are no names and no addresses, the postage rate is lower than addressed mail — that's the whole point of the program.
The cost of an EDDM drop is always the same three things: printing, USPS postage, and the labor of bundling and dropping the mail at the post office. On our EDDM map you select routes and see one all-in number covering all three, with no sales call and no quote request. BrandBoostPrints is the only Washington shop where you can do the entire job — routes, artwork, payment, mailing — online.
How EDDM actually works
EDDM targets carrier routes, not people. A carrier route is one mail carrier's daily walk — usually a few hundred to around a thousand addresses in a contiguous neighborhood. When you select a route, you are buying delivery to every deliverable address on it. You cannot skip houses, and you cannot pick 40 addresses out of a route of 600. Saturation is the trade you make for cheap postage and no list.
You do not need a mailing permit for EDDM. Historically that was the friction: businesses either walked bundles into a post office themselves with paperwork, or hired a mail house and waited on a quote. We mail under our own permit, so you never touch a USPS form.
There is no list to buy, and nothing to clean or dedupe. Address quality — the thing that quietly wastes money on addressed mail — is not a factor, because there are no addresses on the piece. It reads "Local Postal Customer" and the indicia we print in the corner.
What EDDM costs, and where the cost comes from
An EDDM piece costs you print plus postage plus the drop, and those three behave differently as your quantity goes up.
Print cost per piece falls as the route count rises. Setup — plates or press setup, makeready, cutting — is spread across the run, so a 4,000-piece drop has a lower per-piece print cost than a 1,000-piece drop of the same design.
USPS postage per piece does not fall with quantity. The EDDM rate is a flat per-piece price set by USPS, the same on your first route as on your twentieth. That's why your per-piece cost flattens out instead of dropping forever: below a certain point, you are mostly paying postage, and postage doesn't negotiate.
Size and paper move the print half, not the postage half. Going from a lighter stock to a heavier one, or from one flat size to a larger one, changes what the press and the cutter do and changes your print cost. It does not change the EDDM postage rate, as long as the piece stays inside the size and weight limits for the program.
The practical consequence: if you want a cheaper drop, mail fewer routes or print a smaller flat. Trying to save money by shaving paper weight on an EDDM piece usually saves less than people expect, because postage is the fixed floor underneath it.
EDDM pieces have to be flat-sized — which rules out a standard postcard
EDDM requires a flat-sized mailpiece, meaningfully bigger than a standard letter or postcard. This is the detail that catches most first-timers, and it is worth saying plainly even though it costs us a sale: our 6" × 9" postcard at $45 for a box of 100 is a great addressed mailer and is not an EDDM-eligible size on its own. If you want to run EDDM, choose an EDDM-eligible flat size in the configurator — it only offers sizes that qualify, so you cannot accidentally print 5,000 pieces the Postal Service will reject.
The piece also needs space for the EDDM indicia and the "Local Postal Customer" line. We place both when we set your file up, so keep the top or bottom band of one side free of critical copy.
When EDDM is the cheaper choice — and when it isn't
EDDM is cheaper when your customer is defined by geography. Lawn care, roofing, restaurants, dentists, gyms, garage door repair, house cleaning, pizza — anything where "lives within a few miles" is most of the qualification. You are not paying for a list, and postage is below addressed rates.
Addressed mail is cheaper when your list is short and specific. If you want to reach 300 past customers, or every owner of a single-family home built before 1990, EDDM makes you buy entire routes to reach them and you pay for every neighbor in between. At that point an addressed drop to 300 names on a 6" × 9" postcard costs less in total, even at the higher postage rate, because you print 300 pieces instead of 3,000.
Real estate agents sit in the middle. A just-listed or just-sold card to the specific streets around a property is a geographic message, and EDDM handles it well. Farming a subdivision you already have owner names for is usually better as addressed mail, because you can repeat to the same households without paying for the apartment block on the corner of the route.
EDDM cannot do sequencing or personalization. Every piece on a route is identical. No names, no variable offers, no "we noticed your neighbor at 14 Elm just listed." If personalization is the reason the piece works, EDDM is the wrong tool.
How to run an EDDM drop online in one sitting
Open the map, click routes, watch the piece count and the all-in price update as you go. Route selection is the only genuinely strategic step — look at where your existing customers already are, and buy the routes around them before you buy the routes farther out.
Upload artwork at the eligible flat size, leaving the indicia band clear. Pay. We print, bundle, complete the USPS paperwork under our permit, and drop the mail.
If you want a piece that keeps working after the drop, pair the mailer with a reply device. 4" × 5" business reply cards at $78 for 100 make responses easy to send back and easy to count, which is the only reliable way to learn whether a route was worth mailing twice.