Mailing/Postage solutions?

I currently use stamps.com. Pricey for low volume mailing though they add enough to make me stay as a customer. However, their software and service is pretty ratty - server outages (4 hours a few days ago), chokes on some European language characters and weird random errors with inscrutable explanations that crop up from time to time. And trying to get a customer service person on the phone is an exercise in futility. Plus they have a very limited range of supported label types. I took a look at using the USPS stuff and found that to be really bad plus I always seem to get a slightly higher postage cost with them.

What are people using? Cheaper would be great but what I really want is reliability and software that looks like it was actually written in this century.

I use ShipStation but there are plenty of other providers such as shippingeasy and shippo. Their rates aren’t always the best but they aren’t bad either because they leverage their volume to get discounts. I’m not sure about the others but ShipStation uses Stamps.com on the backend for the postage purchasing but it is hidden behind their own user interface. I find it pretty easy to use and it integrates all of my sales channels into one place (Tindie, eBay, and my own store). I ship a lot of orders internationally and I haven’t had issues with unsupported characters in a long time (I did early on but that’s been fixed).

I cobbled together some Python to use the Tindie and ShipStation APIs to automatically create new orders in ShipStation when I get a new order. It takes most of the manual process away other than putting the tracking number back into Tindie.

I use Pirate Ship.

No issues with Unicode characters and I didn’t experience any outages for the two years I’m using them.

Rates are probably comparable to Stamps-dot-com.

Oh, and no monthly fee!