The four real options
Most TCGplayer sellers move through these stages roughly in order as volume grows. There's no wrong place to be — the right one is whichever matches how many orders you're actually shipping.
| Option | Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Handwriting / typing addresses | $0 | A handful of orders a month, no real time pressure |
| Free plan | $0 | Up to 15 labels/mo, trying the workflow with zero commitment |
| Base | $2.99/mo or $29/yr | Regular sellers doing up to 500 labels/mo |
| Premium | $5.99/mo or $59/yr | High-volume sellers who want unlimited labels plus custom design |
Handwriting addresses
Completely free and genuinely fine at very low volume — a few orders a week doesn't justify learning a new tool. The cost shows up as time (each address takes a minute or two to copy correctly) and as risk (a misread digit in a ZIP code is an easy mistake when you're transcribing by hand repeatedly).
A free shipping-label tool
This is where TCG Speed Shipper's free plan sits: upload your TCGplayer packing list CSV, get print-ready PDF labels, no account required, up to 15 a month. It removes the transcription step entirely — the CSV already has the correct address, so there's nothing to mistype. At low volume, this is genuinely enough; there's no reason to pay for something you're not maxing out.
These are address labels, not prepaid postage. Our guide to whether TCGplayer provides shipping labels explains where the Seller Portal export ends and postage begins.
Pirate Ship and Shippo are for buying discounted USPS postage. They do not read a TCGplayer packing-list export on their own. TCG Speed Shipper does: on the Shipping Plan, download the Pirate Ship CSV of your tracked orders and import that file into Pirate Ship, so you are not retyping addresses. Print address labels here, and use Pirate Ship only for the orders that need tracked postage.
When paying starts to make sense
The free plan's 15-label cap is the natural signal. If you're regularly hitting it, Base ($2.99/mo, 500 labels) removes the ceiling for the overwhelming majority of small-to-mid sellers at a price that's hard to justify not paying once volume is real. Premium ($5.99/mo) adds unlimited labels and the Design Studio (your logo, a note and a store QR code on the label, custom colors and fonts, a custom packing-slip message, and saved return-address profiles). Paste Address, which skips the CSV and prints from addresses you paste in (handy for orders from outside TCGplayer), works on every plan, Free included. Each pasted address counts as one label toward the plan's monthly limit.
A free month of Base: the code 1MFREE gives one month of the Base plan (500 labels) with no card required — the checkout itself is $0, so nothing is collected. It grants Base, not Premium. Premium is the separate plan at $5.99/mo (or $59/yr).
The honest bottom line
If you're shipping a handful of orders a week, the free plan is not a lesser version of the product — it's the right plan. Paying makes sense the moment volume, not features, becomes the constraint. That's a decision worth making with your own order numbers in front of you, not a sales page.
Already using another label tool? Switching takes about two minutes: the same TCGplayer export, the same printer, nothing to install.