Plavidian Workbench™
Free USPS Mailing Tools: Answers, Tools, and Standards in One Place
Ask a mailing question and get a straight answer, run your list and artwork through free tools, or read the USPS standards behind both. Everything here is free and needs no sales call to start.
Five ways to use it
Design NEW
Plavidian Studio™
Build print-ready postcards, flyers, door hangers and mailers in your browser - bleed, safe zone, permit and address area, 300 dpi and CMYK checks - and save the file straight to your job.
Ask
Plavidian Expert™
Ask about tabbing, folds, piece sizes, postage eligibility, or EDDM and get an answer grounded in the USPS Domestic Mail Manual and the current Notice 123. No account needed to try it.
Run
Ten free tools
Validate addresses, estimate postage, size a piece, generate an indicia, and plan a drop shipment in your browser. Included with every free account.
Learn
Articles and how-to guides
Step-by-step guides to planning a mailing, plus dated updates when USPS standards or prices change.
Blog
Direct mail, print and USPS
Shorter, more frequent writing on what is changing in mail and print, and what it means for a campaign.
Read
USPS mailing guides
Plain-language guides to mail classes, piece sizes, tabbing, addressing, automation, EDDM, and drop shipment, written from the DMM.
Included with a free account
What each tool does
Mailing Blueprint™
A planning and production tool for the whole mailing - not just a postage estimate.
In-Home Date Estimator
Work backward from the date that matters.
Piece Size Tool
Letter or flat, before it changes your postage.
Permit Imprint Generator
A correct indicia, ready to place.
Weight Calculator
Know the weight before the postage.
Address List Cleanup
Turn a messy list into a mailable one.
Drop Shipment Plan
See where the mail actually goes.
Artwork Prepress
Catch print problems before they print - then fix them.
PDF Page Splitter
One PDF in, the pages you need out.
Run all ten free
Create an account and run every tool with your real files in the portal →
Inside Blueprint™: Density Optimizer
Sometimes mailing more pieces costs less
USPS prices carrier-route mail by how many pieces land on each route, so a route holding 118 pieces pays a higher price on all 118 than it would on 125. Almost every list has routes sitting just under a threshold.
Density Optimizer runs on a completed estimate and finds them. It shows each short route, how many pieces it needs, and what the mailing costs both ways: as submitted, and with those routes filled. You pick the routes you want, and the numbers update as you go. Sometimes filling a route pays for itself several times over. Sometimes it costs more than it saves, and the report says so in plain red numbers, which is the point of running it before anything prints rather than after.
When it does pay, you are adding households in neighborhoods you already chose to mail. For a campaign that is more voters in your best precincts, often at little or no net postage cost. Filling routes needs a source of addresses on those specific routes, which can come from your own held-back names or a targeted list order. Plavidian pulls only the addresses that land where they are needed and stops at the threshold.
Ready to put it to work?
Create a free account for the full toolset, or send us the job and we will handle print, list processing, and mailing under one workflow.