Everything We Do at the Counter, and What It Costs

This is the long version of the note we sent customers in August. If you got the email and wanted the rest, you are in the right place.

We will tell you to go to the post office

Strange thing for a shipping store to admit, but here it is.

We have put 11,926 packages on a truck out of the shop on 1488. Four in ten went USPS. Three in ten went UPS. Two in ten went FedEx. DHL is the sliver at the bottom, and it earns its keep: forty-two of those parcels left the country.

Which means the post office beats us at our own counter about 41 percent of the time, and we hand it to them anyway. No carrier wins everything. That split is the whole reason we keep all four side by side, and we would rather be the people who told you the truth than the people who won one sale.

A real box, this July

Half a pound of contents. Billed as 53 lb.

Twenty-four by twenty-four by fifteen inches, holding a piece of art that weighed about as much as a sandwich. It priced like a fifty-three pound box.

Carriers charge on size as well as weight, so a big light box gets priced as if you had packed it with bricks. Nobody did anything wrong here either. That piece could not go in anything smaller without arriving as a jigsaw.

Sometimes the fix is just a smaller box, and the price drops the second you use one. We watch people pay to ship air most weeks. Not cheap air either. Premium, long-haul, climate-controlled air.

Cutting a box down yourself

It is easier than it sounds. Score the corners, fold the walls in, re-tape it. The tool we keep at the counter for exactly that is a little cardboard saw sold as a children’s craft toy. We are not joking, and we do not get a nickel for saying so. It cuts cardboard and it will not cut you, which is more than the box cutter it replaced could ever claim.

But when a thing genuinely cannot be packed any smaller, like that piece of art, the box stops being the lever. The only thing left is which carrier you hand it to, and on a package billing at fifty pounds the gap between four carriers stops being pocket change and starts being a tank of gas. That is the part you should not have to work out on your own, and the part we do for free.

Tape is a dollar, and here is the honest version

If you only ever come in to hand over a prepaid drop-off, that is completely fine. You never have to buy a thing, and we have taken 2,729 of them.

One honest note, since it is the thing that surprises people at the counter. If your label needs one small strip to hold a corner down we usually do not bother charging you, and regulars get away with murder. But if the box turned up split open and needs half a roll to survive the trip, we will charge the dollar. That is our time and our materials, not a gotcha.

The only other toll is that every now and again you will be asked to read one aloud from the dad joke book on the counter. That part is not negotiable.

A sample, so you can practice: I only know 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know y.

While we are being honest about small charges

USPS QR codes we can scan and print on the spot, and that one is $2. Amazon returns and prepaid drop-offs are free, no purchase, no appointment. The only ask is that the label is already on the box and taped down on all four sides.

Saturday finally pulls its weight

FedEx Express picks up on Saturdays now, so a Saturday Express drop no longer sits until Monday. US Mail still goes out Saturday morning too. Regular UPS and FedEx Ground we will still take on a Saturday, they just move Monday, same as anywhere else.

The other half of what we do

We build and look after websites for local businesses, and several of the shops you drive past on 1488 are on ours. Same counter, same people, same phone number if something breaks.

51 websites. 23 businesses on SEO. 17 companies whose email and marketing we look after. Nearly all of them within thirty minutes of this counter: Magnolia most of all, then The Woodlands, Conroe, Tomball and Houston. The shops you drive past are the portfolio.

It is not just me in a back room either. Tommy, Scott and Ray are local, experienced, and cover what I do not. I write 99 percent of the code and do about half the SEO. They handle the rest, which is why your site does not sit broken because one person took a day off.

What everybody else charges, and what you actually pay

Industry pricing guides for 2026 put a professionally built small-business site at $4,000 to $8,000 to start, and that is the floor. Boutique studios begin around $6,000 and run past $35,000.

Here is our whole price list. No discovery call required to see it.

Standard build	$1,997
You rent a mailbox with us	$1,500
And a veteran or first responder	$1,275

A $500 deposit gets a build moving, and it comes straight off the price. So the most you ever put down to start is five hundred dollars, and if you already keep a mailbox with us the whole thing lands at fifteen hundred.

The mailbox discount is not a gimmick. If you rent a box here you are already running something, we already know you, and you are easier to work with than a stranger. That is worth $497 to us.

Every site we hand over has to score over 90 in Google’s own speed test. Not our test. Google’s. You can run it yourself on any site, ours or theirs, in about thirty seconds, and see the number for yourself.

Prices are published on the websites page instead of quoted after a “discovery call,” so you can read them without speaking to a single human being. There is also getting found on Google, marketing that reaches Magnolia, and if you already have a site, ways to supercharge it. Veterans and first responders take 15 percent off any plan, any tier, always. Not a promotion, and it does not expire.

Business cards, and why we will not fight you on them

You can get cards cheaper from the big online printers. Theirs are thinner, ours are heavier stock, and honestly that is a small argument. We would rather spend the time showing you a better way to market, a better way to email your customers, and a website that turns visitors into calls, than squabble over the margin on a box of cards.

One thing that is not obvious from a postal counter

I spent several years as a software engineer at Amazon after I got out of the military. This store was a side quest, so my wife had something steady behind her while she goes through law school.

That is most of the reason the prices are printed on the page instead of quoted after a call. It is also why, if you ask, I will put you in touch with a customer whose site we built so you can ask them directly whether they are happy with it. I do not know anyone else around here who offers that.

Before you buy the cheapest site you can find, it is worth knowing that plenty of those are assembled offshore or pasted together from a template, security holes included. Before you pay the most for one, a good part of that number is covering fifty salaries in an office somewhere. We are the third option, and you can drive to us.

Come see us

9311 FM 1488 Rd, Suite 30, Magnolia, TX 77354. Monday through Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 4, closed Sunday. 936-444-9711.

Bring the box in before you tape it and we will price it across all four carriers. No charge for the answer.