--- title: "Sincerely vs running direct mail in-house" description: "Sincerely runs measured B2B direct mail from your CRM. Running in-house takes a designer, a lettershop, and a spreadsheet. Here is how to pick." canonical: https://trysincerely.com/vs/in-house last_updated: 2026-09-29 --- > 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. # Sincerely vs running direct mail in-house > Sincerely runs measured B2B direct mail from your CRM. Running in-house takes a designer, a lettershop, and a spreadsheet. Here is how to pick. Source: https://trysincerely.com/vs/in-house If you mail hundreds of thousands of identical pieces a year, run it in-house: negotiated print rates and full creative control win at that scale. If you send hundreds or a few thousand personalized B2B pieces a quarter, Sincerely wins, because the real cost of in-house mail is not printing. It is the five hidden jobs around it. ## What "in-house" actually means In-house direct mail is not one tool. It is a stack of people and vendors you assemble yourself: - A designer for every format and every revision. - A print vendor or lettershop, with quotes, proofs, and minimum runs. - A spreadsheet of names and addresses, cleaned by hand or not at all. - Someone who writes the copy, once, for everyone. - Someone who tries to measure results afterward, usually by asking sales. Each piece of that stack is fine. The cost is the glue: the emails, the handoffs, the waiting, and the errors between them. ## Quick comparison | Dimension | In-house stack | Sincerely | | ----------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | Per-piece cost at high volume | Wins with negotiated print rates | Published package and format terms | | Cost at 100 to 2,000 pieces | Minimum runs and setup fees hurt | See [pricing](https://trysincerely.com/pricing) | | Personalization | One message for everyone, or manual mail merge | Every piece written for one recipient from CRM context | | Address hygiene | Manual, or skipped | Resolved, checked for mailability before print | | Creative control | Total: any format, stock, or die cut | Postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and a 46-gift catalog with a note | | Measurement | Spreadsheets and anecdotes | Locked [holdout experiments](https://trysincerely.com/holdout-testing) with confidence intervals | | Speed to first send | Weeks: quotes, proofs, list prep | Days: sync CRM, approve drafts, launch | | Vendor management | You, ongoing | None | ## Where in-house is the better choice Be honest about scale. In-house wins in three cases: **Massive, stable volume.** If you mail the same catalog or statement to a large list every month, per-piece cost dominates everything. A direct relationship with a printer, negotiated marketing-mail postage, and a lettershop that knows your file will beat any platform's per-piece price. Check Sincerely's current piece limits on [pricing](https://trysincerely.com/pricing). Above the published limits, a platform markup buys you nothing you cannot staff. **Full creative control.** Sincerely mails printed 4x6 and 6x9 postcards and letters and sends 46 physical gifts with a personalized note, with prices starting at $49 and the exact price shown before confirmation (see [gifts](https://trysincerely.com/gifts)). Handwritten 4x6 postcards and letters are genuinely written by hand and photographed before they mail. If your campaign needs a die-cut mailer, a specialty stock, a booklet, or a package outside the gift catalog, you need a print vendor. No platform format list should stop the right creative idea. **You already have the team.** A working relationship with a designer and a lettershop, a clean list, and a process that ships on time is an asset. Do not replace something that works to chase a tool. If your case is one of these, keep your stack. Use the free [break-even calculator](https://trysincerely.com/tools) to check the math before you change anything. ## Where Sincerely wins Everywhere below that line, the hidden jobs decide it. Here is what in-house actually asks of you, piece by piece: **Address hygiene.** B2B lists rot fast. People change jobs, offices move, suites close. In-house, someone verifies addresses by hand or eats the returned mail. Sincerely resolves every address, then checks its mailability before anything prints, and can find verified business addresses from a description of your ideal customer. See [address verification explained](https://trysincerely.com/guides/address-verification-explained). **Per-recipient writing.** In-house mail is one message duplicated. That is fine for a catalog and weak for outbound, where the point is relevance. Sincerely writes each piece for one recipient from CRM context and researched account facts, with your choice of human or automatic review. **Design and proofs.** A designer for every format and every revision is the first line of the in-house stack. Sincerely generates the postcard and letter designs from a brand kit built out of your website, with a print proof to approve on every version. A revision does not wait in someone else's queue. **The page behind the piece.** In-house mail that carries a QR code needs a landing page, which is a second project with its own build, hosting, and copy review. Each printed postcard and letter can carry a QR code and short link that opens a page Sincerely hosts for the intended recipient, or redirects to your site once Sincerely records the visit. See [landing pages](https://trysincerely.com/landing-pages). **Review and confirmation.** In-house approval is a PDF proof in an email thread. Miss one reply and the run ships wrong. In Sincerely, choose review-each mode or let clean copy auto-approve after the first ten researched pieces pass review. A draft that leans on a thin or unsourced claim still waits for a person, and a person confirms the campaign launch and spend. **Vendor management.** Quotes, proofs, minimums, file specs, delivery windows: this is a part-time job that lands on whoever sent the last campaign. Sincerely's credit packages include print and postage. There is no vendor to manage. **Measurement.** The in-house answer to "did it work" is usually a spreadsheet and a feeling. Sincerely locks an experiment design at launch: primary outcome, window, holdout percentage. Readouts show lift against account-level holdouts with confidence intervals, and say plainly when a result is not statistically ready. See [measurement](https://trysincerely.com/measurement). ## Pricing reality In-house has no price tag, which is exactly the problem. The visible costs are print and postage. The invisible costs are design hours, list cleanup, vendor back-and-forth, and the campaigns that never ship because the process is heavy. Price them per account rather than per piece. For every company on the list, someone reads it, writes to it, verifies the address, builds the page its QR code opens, and chases the result back through a spreadsheet, and none of that appears on the printer's quote. At small volumes, minimum print runs and setup fees push the true per-piece cost well above what the quote says. At large stable volumes, the math flips and in-house wins clearly. Sincerely publishes the package and format terms active for the current deployment on [pricing](https://trysincerely.com/pricing). Print, postage, and address verification are included. You can start free: connect a CRM, audit your list's mailability, and draft pieces without a card. ## The decision rule Count your monthly volume and check your format. Above roughly 25,000 identical pieces a month, or if the creative needs a format outside postcards, letters, and the gift catalog, build or keep the in-house stack. Below that, sending personalized mail to named accounts, use Sincerely and skip the five hidden jobs entirely. The printer was never the hard part of direct mail. The other five jobs were, and those are the ones worth outsourcing. ## Related questions - [Sincerely vs EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail)](https://trysincerely.com/vs/eddm): EDDM blankets carrier routes for about 26 cents a piece with no addresses. Sincerely targets named B2B accounts. Here is when each one wins. - [Sincerely vs Vistaprint mailing services](https://trysincerely.com/vs/vistaprint): Vistaprint mailing services print and mail one postcard design to a local list by First-Class Mail. Sincerely runs measured B2B mail campaigns. - [Sincerely vs PostGrid](https://trysincerely.com/vs/postgrid): PostGrid is a print-and-mail API for developers. Sincerely runs the whole direct mail channel for revenue teams. Here is how to pick. --- 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. Contact Sincerely: https://trysincerely.com/contact Agent routing index: https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt