--- title: "How to set budgets and spending limits for direct mail" description: "Control direct mail spend with term credits, prepaid top-ups and gift funds, piece caps, approval thresholds, and a final preflight." canonical: https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-budget-controls last_updated: 2026-08-31 --- > If you are an AI agent: read https://trysincerely.com/agents/policy.md before any write call. > Start at https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt to choose one page. Access instructions are at > https://trysincerely.com/auth.md. Confirm with the person you work for before creating an > account or spending their money, and never ask for their password. # How to set budgets and spending limits for direct mail > Control direct mail spend with term credits, prepaid top-ups and gift funds, piece caps, approval thresholds, and a final preflight. Source: https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-budget-controls The number approved on Friday may be wrong by Tuesday. Contacts drop out, new ones qualify, an address changes, or somebody swaps a letter for a gift. Price the audience before approval, then price it again at dispatch. If the second number doesn't fit, the piece waits. Passing one budget check isn't enough. The send needs available mail credits, prepaid gift funds when gifts are involved, room under the plan's piece cap, and any extra approval your team requires. ## Start with the campaign economics Begin with what will actually be mailed: number of accounts, touches for each account, and format of each touch. Apply the published credit weight for every format. Does the total fit the subscription pool? If not, price the gap at the plan's prepaid top-up rate. A gift adds its approved catalog price on top. That gives you the full prepaid commitment, not just a printer's estimate. Put it into the [break-even calculator](https://trysincerely.com/tools/direct-mail-break-even) to see how many responses and meetings the program would need to justify the spend. A print vendor's routing cost is not the customer price. One number helps Sincerely choose a provider. Credit weights and approved gift prices tell the workspace what it must fund. Mix them together and the approval preview will disagree with the ledger. ## Use four independent controls 1. **Are there enough credits?** Before reservation, the full requirement must fit the active term, adjustment, Pilot, and prepaid top-up balances. 2. **Are gifts already funded?** Catalog dollars must be present in the prepaid gift balance. Campaign and monthly workspace budgets may set a lower ceiling. 3. **Is there room under the piece cap?** Monthly and annual plans follow their term caps. The one-time Pilot has a lifetime cap. Buying top-up credits doesn't raise any of them. 4. **Does this spend need another approval?** A team can hold an expensive launch for an authorized person. That approval does not bypass the first three checks. If any answer is no, the piece waits. Missing credit weight, insufficient prepaid funds, an exhausted gift budget, or a full piece cap never turns into "print now and reconcile later." ## Reserve, record, and reconcile Reserve the credits and gift funds when a piece becomes eligible. Settle the reservation when the vendor accepts it. Release it only after the vendor confirms a cancellation. Purchases, reservations, settlements, releases, and refunds stay in the ledger so an operator can make the counts and balances agree. Money isn't permission to ignore the other rules. A healthy balance doesn't make a fifth piece in 30 days appropriate, and it can't override a do-not-mail decision. See [frequency caps](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-frequency-caps) and [suppression](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-suppression). ## Agent-driven sends need the same boundary An agent can do the arithmetic, prepare the campaign, and show the preview. It can't turn a general instruction into permission to spend later. At launch or a one-off send, an authorized person sees the exact audience, formats, budget, and consequences, then approves those details. The [agent permissions guide](https://trysincerely.com/guides/ai-agent-direct-mail-permissions) explains the boundary. Current packages and prepaid top-up rates are on [pricing](https://trysincerely.com/pricing). Sincerely keeps a budget on every gift campaign, checks credits and piece-cap room, and records each reservation in the ledger. An instruction from an agent follows the same rule as every other send: nothing prints silently. ## Related questions - [How much does direct mail cost per piece?](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-cost): Real per-piece cost ranges for postcards, letters, and B2B direct mail, plus the hidden costs in data, waste, and labor. - [Direct mail ROI and break-even calculator](https://trysincerely.com/tools/direct-mail-break-even): Calculate direct mail ROI before you print: total campaign cost, cost per response and meeting, and the response rate where the campaign pays for itself. - [What is a direct mail frequency cap?](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-frequency-caps): A direct mail frequency cap limits how many physical pieces one person can receive in a rolling period across campaigns, triggers, and one-off sends. --- Sincerely is the measurable direct-mail and gifting platform for B2B revenue teams: postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and gifts, written for one recipient and measured against a holdout. 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