The relationship
How we work together
A mailing club is a promise you make to your members every month, and we are the half of it that has to be dull and dependable. This is the whole arrangement, written down: the rhythm we run to, what a run costs and how it is paid for, and why there is no contract holding either of us in place.
The monthly rhythm
5 steps- Step 01
Brief
Your issue plan and artwork land against a shared calendar deadline.
- Step 02
Proof
Nothing runs unproofed: digital every issue, physical whenever the spec changes.
- Step 03
Print
Your issue runs on the same press, to the same spec, as the issue before it.
- Step 04
QC
Colour, stock and count checked against your club’s reference sample.
- Step 05
Dispatch
Boxed to your door, or stuffed and posted to your subscribers, on the promised date.
Repeat, monthly
We earn next month's run by delivering this month's.
The calendar is the contract
Every club gets a shared issue calendar before its first run, and it carries three dates for every issue: the artwork deadline, the print window, and the dispatch date we guarantee. They are agreed in advance and written down, so nobody is guessing in the last week: you know when your files are due, and your members can be told when their envelope lands.
Those dates are the actual agreement between us. There is no contract to enforce, so the calendar does the job a contract only pretends to do: it says exactly what you owe us and when, and exactly what we owe you and when. Files on the deadline, envelopes on the date you promised.
It also turns a bad month into a conversation instead of a surprise. If artwork is going to be late, tell us early: the more notice we have, the more of the calendar we can protect, and the better the odds the dispatch date survives it. What we will not do is go quiet and let you find out from your subscribers.
A promise repeated, whatever your rhythm
Most printers are built for one-off jobs, where the schedule is whatever this week allows. A mailing club is a promise repeated monthly, and we are structured around keeping it: your run is planned into the floor as a recurring commitment rather than quoted fresh each time as though we had never met.
Monthly is the default rhythm and the one subscribers internalise, but the discipline is identical for bi-monthly and quarterly clubs, and we schedule production around whichever you chose. The commitment is to your cadence. Pick the one you can hold on your worst month, not your best one, and we will build the calendar around that.
The commercial model, plainly
We sell print. That is the whole of it, and it is the part that tends to surprise creators who have spent a few years handing percentages to platforms. Four things, and none of them have small print:
- No commission, no platform fees, no revenue share.
You keep 100% of your subscription revenue. Your members’ money never passes through us: we are a supplier, not a platform, and the only invoice you get carries print on it.
Everything else in a club’s stack takes a percentage (Etsy 10–15%, Patreon 8–12%, MailClubly 8%), which is fair enough, since those are billing platforms charging for billing, but the numbers are worth holding up: they show what a percentage costs once a club works. Put the smallest of them, 8%, on the illustrative 2,000-member club at £10 a month and it comes to £1,600 a month (£19,200 a year) on top of the print bill. There is no version of our quote with that line in it.
Platform fee ranges: Creator-community discussions (Etsy forums, Reddit art-business, Substack club posts), 2026.
- Priced per run, with transparent volume price breaks.
We quote the whole monthly run (the items, the stocks, the finishing, the envelope) and you can see the per-unit cost that quote implies. As the club grows, that per-unit cost falls.
On our illustrative examples the same six-item envelope prints at £2.35 a copy for a 100-member club, £1.65 at 500, and £1.30 at 2,000, roughly 45% off the unit cost across that span. All of it lands in your margin, because we take no share of what your members pay. Your growth improves your economics rather than ours, which is the alignment we want. Three clubs, costed line by line shows the full stacks those figures come from.
We do not publish a price list, because what an envelope costs depends entirely on what is in it. Real numbers come out of a sample round, with the paper in your hands.
- Paid per run, monthly.
Each month you pay for that month’s run: we print it, and post it too if you are on Print & Post. That is the entire commercial relationship.
There is no subscription to us, no retainer, no minimum spend and no seat fee: nothing leaves your account in a month you do not print. If your club runs bi-monthly or quarterly, you pay on that rhythm instead. You are paying for issues, not for time.
- No contracts, no lock-in, no minimum term.
There is nothing to sign, so there is nothing to get out of. No notice period, no exclusivity, no clause that makes leaving expensive. You are free to take your spec and shop around any month you like.
We would rather you felt free to. A creator who stays because leaving is awkward is not a reference, and a printer who has to be worth re-booking every month is a printer who checks the colour properly. Retention is earned, never enforced.
We earn next month's run by delivering this month's.
It is a test you get to apply to us on every issue: was last month’s envelope worth booking again? Nothing else keeps your club here. That is why the proofing, the reference sample and the guaranteed dispatch date are not sales copy: they are how we keep passing it.
How we grow with you
No club stays the size it started at, and the arrangement is built to move with yours. The rhythm does not change as you grow. The unit price does, and it goes down.
The first fifty
Almost every club starts here: one narrow niche, a few dozen members, and an envelope you pack at the kitchen table. Print Only is the on-ramp: we print the issue, QC it against your reference sample and box it to your door, and you keep the hand-packing, the handwritten note and the part your first members will tell their friends about. That is not the lesser tier; for a lot of clubs it is the product.
Short runs do cost more per unit, and we would rather say so than bury it: print is about £2.35 an envelope at 100 subscribers on our illustrative figures, with a pack day of one relaxed evening a month. It is also the cheapest moment to change your format, which nearly every club does after issue 1.
500 subscribers, and the wall
Around 500 subscribers, two things have happened at once. Volume price breaks have already taken roughly 30% off your print cost per envelope (about £350 a run back into your margin compared with the 100-member rate), and pack day has grown into two-plus full days a month. Creators call that second one the wall, and it arrives whether or not the rest of your life has room for it.
This is where Print & Post exists: we print, collate, stuff, validate every address against Royal Mail’s PAF file and dispatch the whole run, so the club keeps growing without your weekends paying for it.
Thousands, and other countries
At a few thousand members the club is a business with a production line behind it. Print keeps falling (£1.30 an envelope at 2,000 on the same illustrative stack), and the decision that moves your margin most becomes postage: whether the set was engineered to post as a letter rather than a large letter, at home and abroad.
Subscriber lists stop being one country long before this point. We dispatch UK and international members in the same run from Wembley, London, so expanding overseas is a spec conversation rather than a second operation you have to build. Clubs in this trend run from a few dozen to 8,000+ subscribers; the arrangement on this page is the same at either end of that range.
The move between tiers is yours to call
We will not push you across. Print & Post is a bigger invoice than Print Only because it is more work, so weigh our advice knowing that. The advice is usually the same either way: move when pack day stops fitting the life you have, not when a subscriber count says you should. Plenty of clubs stay hand-packed well past 500 members on purpose, and that is a decision rather than a delay.
A named contact
One person owns your club’s rhythm. They know your spec (the stock you chose in sampling and the one you rejected) along with your artwork deadline and your dispatch date, and they are who answers when you email. You are not re-explaining your club to whoever picked the ticket up.
That matters most in the months that go off-plan: artwork slipping, a stock change halfway through the year, a run that suddenly needs 200 more envelopes than the last one. With context, those are five-minute conversations. Without it, they are a week of being passed along a queue while your dispatch date gets closer.
We are not going to invent a name and a portrait for this page. Your contact is a real person in the building where your work is printed, alongside the press operators and the finishing team who handle your issues, and the invitation to meet all of them on shift in Wembley, London is always open. Until then, start the conversation by email and a human replies.
See the whole relationship first
The playbook shows the monthly rhythm from the creator’s side: deadlines, proofs, and what to expect from a printer every month.
- Niches & the envelope
- Pricing & the real cost stack
- Scaling past 500