3PL weekly vs monthly billing: 4.333

A rate card lands with a platform fee of $999 on it. You put the $999 into the monthly column of your comparison sheet, because monthly is the column you have. It belongs in a cell that reads $4,329.00, because the unit next to it says per week.

That is not a hidden fee. It is a published rate on a public pricing page, read on 4 August 2026, with the unit printed next to the number. What goes missing is the period, because the spreadsheet you are pasting into has a column called “monthly” and the rate card does not.

We maintain a dataset of 241 sourced fee rows across 23 fulfillment operations, each row carrying the vendor’s own unit string as printed. ShipCalm is the only company in it whose unit names a week. Every one of those rows is in the table below, converted, with the multiplication shown. That is a claim about published units on the pages we read, not about how anyone invoices behind a login.

What does a $999-a-week plan actually cost per month?

$4,329.00. That is $999 × 52 ÷ 12, and it is $3,330.00 a month more than a reader who treats the number as monthly will budget for.

Across a year the gap is $39,960.00, which is $999 × 40, because reading a weekly rate as a monthly one budgets for 12 weekly invoices in a year that holds 52. The general form of that error is worth memorizing, because it does not depend on the rate:

What you do to a weekly rate	Weeks you end up accounting for in a year	Annual shortfall, as a multiple of the weekly rate
Read it as if it were monthly	12	40×
Multiply by 4	48	4×
Multiply by 4.333	51.996	0.004×
Multiply by 52/12	52	none

Our arithmetic. 52 − 12 = 40, 52 − 48 = 4, 52 − 51.996 = 0.004.

Why 4 is the wrong multiplier and 4.333 is the wrong precision

Four is wrong because a month is not four weeks. Twelve four-week blocks is 48 weeks, and the year holds 52, so a ×4 conversion silently drops four weekly invoices. On the $999 plan that is $3,996.00 a year missing from the model, which is the same amount the ×4 conversion says the plan costs in a month.

4.333 is the right idea rounded to the wrong place. The exact multiplier is 52/12, a repeating 4.3333…, and 4.333 × 12 is 51.996 weeks, not 52. The error is four thousandths of a week a year. On the $1,750/week Legendary plan (rates-midmarket.csv:63) that is $7.00 a year, or $0.58 a month: 4.333 gives $7,582.75 where 52/12 gives $7,583.33. Nobody is going bankrupt on $7.00. It matters because this is the one number on a quote comparison that has an exact answer, and a model that rounds the exact part is a model you will not trust when it disagrees with an invoice.

Use 52/12. In a spreadsheet that is =52/12, not =4.333.

Every ShipCalm row priced by the week

per week and per week per SKU and per week per cubic foot are the units as ShipCalm prints them, reproduced here rather than paraphrased. The last two columns are our arithmetic on the vendor’s published figure.

Fee item as published	Unit as published	Amount	× 52 = per year	÷ 12 = monthly average	Row
Essentials plan, DTC	per week	$49.00	$2,548.00	$212.33	rates-midmarket.csv:58
Essentials plan, B2B	per week	$89.00	$4,628.00	$385.67	rates-midmarket.csv:59
Essentials plan, Omni-Channel	per week	$119.00	$6,188.00	$515.67	rates-midmarket.csv:60
Managed plan	per week	$295.00	$15,340.00	$1,278.33	rates-midmarket.csv:61
Pro plan (plan card)	per week	$999.00	$51,948.00	$4,329.00	rates-midmarket.csv:62
Pro plan (comparison table on the same page)	per week	$895.00	$46,540.00	$3,878.33	rates-midmarket.csv:62 notes
Legendary plan	per week	$1,750.00	$91,000.00	$7,583.33	rates-midmarket.csv:63
Returns or dropship platform add-on (conditions: add-on to Essentials plan)	per week	$49.00	$2,548.00	$212.33	rates-midmarket.csv:64
Customer support / call center base, covering 50 conversations	per week	$249.00	$12,948.00	$1,079.00	rates-midmarket.csv:65
SKU management (pricing detail)	per week per SKU	$1.45	$75.40 per SKU	$6.2833 per SKU	rates-midmarket.csv:90
SKU management (comparison table)	per week per SKU	$1.25	$65.00 per SKU	$5.4167 per SKU	rates-midmarket.csv:90 notes
Storage (pricing detail)	per week per cubic foot	$0.19	$9.88 per cu ft	$0.8233 per cu ft	rates-midmarket.csv:91
Storage (comparison table)	per week per cubic foot	$0.18	$9.36 per cu ft	$0.7800 per cu ft	rates-midmarket.csv:91 notes

Source for every row: ShipCalm pricing details, pricing-detail and plan-card figures read 2026-08-04, comparison-table figures read 2026-08-10. The “per year” and “monthly average” columns are ours.

The Pro plan, SKU management and storage are each published twice at different values on one URL, which we cover in do 3PLs publish pricing. We record the primary figure, record the second in the row’s notes, and resolve neither, because the page does not. What we can do is run the conversion on both and hand you the bracket: the Pro plan is $3,878.33 or $4,329.00 a month, and which one your invoice uses is a question for the vendor, not for us.

The monthly column is an average, and it is worth being precise about what an average is here. A weekly-billed vendor sends four invoices in most calendar months and five in the rest. On the Pro plan that is $3,996.00 or $4,995.00, a 25% swing between two consecutive months at an entirely unchanged rate. $4,329.00 is the number that makes a 12-month projection add up to $51,948.00. It is not a number that will ever appear on an invoice.

$1.45 per SKU per week, on 140 SKUs

The SKU-management row is the largest single line this conversion moves, and it is priced on a denominator no per-order comparison has a column for.

Our illustrative order profile is the same one we use throughout: 2,000 orders a month, 1.6 items per order, 140 SKUs, 400 cubic feet on hand, 8% returns. The profile is ours and illustrative. The rate is published.

Line	Arithmetic	Result
SKU management at $1.45, per week	1.45 × 140	$203.00 a week
The same, per year	203.00 × 52	$10,556.00
The same, monthly average	10,556.00 ÷ 12	$879.67
At the comparison table’s $1.25 instead	1.25 × 140 × 52	$9,100.00 a year
The gap between the two published figures	10,556.00 − 9,100.00	$1,456.00 a year

Our arithmetic on rates-midmarket.csv:90 and the second figure in that row’s notes.

Now scale the profile down to a 500-order-a-month brand and hold the catalogue at 140 SKUs, which is what a brand that is small in volume and broad in range actually looks like. The SKU meter does not move: it is still $10,556.00 a year, because it is priced on SKU count and weeks, not on orders.

Against what? ShipCalm’s DTC per-order fee is $2.65 (rates-midmarket.csv:67), so 2.65 × 500 × 12 is $15,900.00 a year. The SKU-management line is about two-thirds of that, for a meter a per-order comparison never touches at all. Adding the $0.95 per-item pick (rates-midmarket.csv:69) at 1.6 items an order gives 0.95 × 800 × 12 = $9,120.00, so DTC pick and pack together is $25,020.00 and SKU management is 42% of it. Read the pick fee as applying only to items beyond the first and the pick line is 0.95 × 300 × 12 = $3,420.00, the pick-and-pack total is $19,320.00, and SKU management is 55% of it. The rate card does not say which reading is right, which is a separate problem we work through in the method pillar.

We are stating both sums and both readings deliberately. A sentence that compares $10,556.00 to “the pick-and-pack bill” without saying which rows it added is a sentence that can be made true by choosing the rows afterwards.

Stop normalizing quotes by hand. The 3PL Quote Normalizer Kit takes your order profile plus up to 5 competing rate cards and returns true all-in cost per order, a 12-month projection, and breakeven volumes, plus the RFP template and 40-point contract red-flag checklist. It converts weekly rates at 52/12 and brackets vendors that publish two figures for one fee. Get the Kit →

Two storage rates that look 4.33x apart and are not

Read as printed, ShipCalm’s storage looks like roughly a quarter of Amazon’s. Converted, the two sit between identical and 5.6% apart, and which of those it is depends on which of ShipCalm’s two published figures the invoice uses.

• ShipCalm publishes storage at $0.19 per week per cubic foot (rates-midmarket.csv:91), and at $0.18 in its comparison table. Converted at 52/12: $0.8233 and $0.7800 per cubic foot per month.
• Amazon FBA’s non-peak standard-size storage is $0.78 per cubic foot per month (rates-platforms.csv:6). That figure is dated: the row records it as confirmed effective 1 April 2024, and its own note says the current 2026 rate was not independently confirmed at the 4 August read. Amazon’s current full Jan–Sep / Oct–Dec table is recorded as QUOTE_GATED (rates-platforms.csv:7).

On the lower of ShipCalm’s two published figures the two rates are identical to the cent: $0.18 × 52 ÷ 12 is exactly $0.78. That is not a coincidence, it is the conversion factor showing through. $0.78 ÷ $0.18 is 4.333, so a rate that is 4.333x smaller per week is the same rate per month. On the higher figure, $0.19, ShipCalm comes out 5.6% more expensive than Amazon, where the printed numbers put it 75.6% cheaper. Nothing about $0.18 and $0.19 and $0.78 tells you either of those things. Only the unit does.

Five clocks and a missing one, on published rate cards

ShipCalm’s 35 rows in our dataset are not all on the weekly clock, which is the part that catches people who have learned the weekly thing and then relaxed. The same page also prices per order, per item, per pallet, per shipment, and per quarter.

Clock as printed	A row that uses it	Periods in a year
per week per cubic foot	ShipCalm storage, $0.19 (rates-midmarket.csv:91)	52
per month	Fulfyld pallet storage, $28.00, on its 501–1,000 orders/month tier (rates-midmarket.csv:17)	12
per cubic foot per 30 days	Flexport standard storage, $0.81, Jan–Sep only (rates-midmarket.csv:32)	12.17
per DSKU per day	Flexport minimum storage charge, $0.10 (rates-platforms.csv:83)	365
per quarter	ShipCalm minimum spend, $6,000 (rates-midmarket.csv:92)	4
per cubic foot	Launch Fulfillment storage, $0.40–$0.60 (rates-midmarket.csv:95)	not published

Units reproduced verbatim from the unit column; the qualifiers come from each row’s conditions or fee_item. Period counts are ours. Fulfyld’s $28.00 is the rate published against one volume tier, and Fulfyld notes its storage tiers get up to 13% cheaper at higher volume. Flexport’s $0.81 is the January–September rate; that row’s fee_item reads standard storage (Jan-Sep), and Flexport publishes a separate Oct–Dec rate of $2.40 on the same unit and the same page (rates-midmarket.csv:34, accessed 2026-08-04), which we do not use here.

The quarterly minimum is the same conversion in the other direction. ShipCalm’s $6,000 per quarter, billed as pay-the-difference, is $24,000 a year, $2,000.00 a month, or $461.54 a week. A brand budgeting $6,000 a month against it is over-reserving by a factor of three; a brand budgeting $6,000 a year is under-reserving by four.

The last row is the state that is not silence and is not a rate. Launch Fulfillment publishes $0.40–$0.60 per cubic foot with no time period anywhere on the page. We re-read that page on 2026-08-12 specifically to check whether we had dropped a period in transcription, and we had not: the omission is the vendor’s. Read as monthly it is 12 charges a year, read as weekly it is 52, and the difference is more than four times the bill on identical inventory. We record the unit as published rather than inferring one, because inferring a period is exactly the error this guide exists to describe.

And a fourth state, which is neither of the above: ShipBob publishes the period and not the price. Its bin, shelf and pallet storage rows carry the units per bin per month, per shelf per month and per pallet per month with the amount recorded as QUOTE_GATED (rates-platforms.csv:70–:72). You know the clock and not the number. That is a different thing from having no row at all, and both are different from a published figure.

A weekly allowance is not a monthly allowance divided by 4.333

Periods attach to allowances as well as to prices, and the conversion behaves differently.

ShipCalm’s customer-support base is $249 per week, and its conditions field records that the fee covers 50 conversations/tickets (rates-midmarket.csv:65). Conversations beyond that are billed at $2.95 each, on a per conversation unit with no clock on it at all (rates-midmarket.csv:66).

The price converts cleanly: $249 × 52 ÷ 12 is $1,079.00 a month. The allowance does not. Fifty a week averages 216.67 a month, but an allowance that resets weekly does not pool the way a monthly one does. A support month with 180 tickets sits comfortably inside that 216.67 average and can still bill overage twice: 60 in one week and 55 in another is 15 conversations past the weekly allowance, $44.25 at $2.95 each, in a month the monthly-average arithmetic scores as running 36.67 conversations under the allowance. Whether an unused weekly allowance carries forward is not stated on the page we read, and we are not going to assume it in either direction.

This is the part of period conversion that a spreadsheet will not catch for you, because the spreadsheet converts the rate and leaves the threshold alone.

Is a weekly fee a hidden fee?

No, and the distinction is the whole point. Every figure in this guide is on a public page anyone can open right now, and each carries its URL and read date in the Sources list below. Where the vendor printed a unit beside the number, we copied that string verbatim; where the vendor printed no period at all, as on the Launch Fulfillment storage line, we recorded the absence rather than filling it in. We did not obtain any of it under NDA, from a leaked quote, or from a customer’s invoice. We read one URL on 4 August 2026 and again on 10 August 2026.

What makes these fees behave like hidden ones is that a rate card is read into a comparison template, and comparison templates have a monthly column. The $1.45 gets typed into it. Nothing was concealed and $10,556.00 a year still went missing, because the reader supplied a period the vendor never claimed. The fix is not vigilance about vendors. It is a column in your own template for the unit, copied verbatim, with the conversion done afterwards and shown.

The vendors that are genuinely hard to compare here are the ones with no figure at all, and we count those separately in the hidden fees guide and on the full benchmark table.

What to put in the RFP so every quote comes back on one clock

Four lines, and they are cheap to send:

1. “State the billing period for every line item, in the same words you use on the invoice.” Not “monthly pricing” as a heading. The period on each line.
2. “If any line is billed weekly, state the number of billing weeks in a contract year.” Fifty-two is the answer you expect. Ask anyway, because it is the assumption that produced the $3,330.00 a month above, and because a vendor billing 13 four-week periods will tell you here.
3. “State the reset period for every included allowance separately from its price.” A support bundle, a free-pick allowance and a storage inclusion can each reset on a different clock from the fee that carries them.
4. “Where your published page shows two figures for one fee, tell me which one the invoice uses.” This is a fair question about a public page and it takes one sentence to answer.

What to do next

1. Open your quotes and add one column: the unit, copied verbatim. Not normalized, not paraphrased. per week per SKU goes in as per week per SKU.
2. Convert with =52/12, never 4 and never 4.333. Then multiply the weekly rate by 40 to see what a monthly misreading would have cost you across a year, which is the number that makes the point to whoever signs.
3. Price your SKU count, not just your order count. A weekly per-SKU fee is flat against volume and brutal against a long tail. On 140 SKUs, $1.45 a week is $10,556.00 a year at any order volume.
4. Ask what the allowance resets on, separately from what the fee costs. See the RFP lines above.
5. Normalize everything against one order profile before you rank anything, using our apples-to-apples method or the Kit.

Our own limitations, stated

This is 23 fulfillment operations, not the market, and three of them (Amazon FBA, Amazon MCF and Walmart WFS) are marketplace programs rather than 3PLs. It is US-focused.

We enumerate the weekly rows in a table rather than giving you a count of them. Our figure check reproduces every hand-typed count on this site from a predicate that recomputes it from the CSVs, and no predicate it accepts can reproduce “rows whose unit contains the word week”. A count nobody can recompute is exactly the kind of number that goes stale quietly, so the table above is the claim, and every row in it carries its own line reference. The same treatment, for the same reason, as the distinct-unit finding in our storage units guide.

Every conversion here is arithmetic on a published rate, and arithmetic is not a quote. $4,329.00 is what $999 a week comes to; it is not a price ShipCalm has offered anyone. The order profile is illustrative and the SKU count, order count and items-per-order figures in it are ours.

Rows were read on the dates in the Sources list below and vendors change prices without notice. ShipCalm’s pricing-detail figures were read 2026-08-04 and its comparison-table figures 2026-08-10; both are recorded and neither is resolved. The Amazon FBA storage figure used above is a 2024 baseline, dated in the sentence that uses it. The first full re-verification cycle completes 2026-11-04.

If you find a figure of ours that no longer matches its source, email data@ratecardlab.com. We publish corrections at ratecardlab.com/corrections/ and buyers of the workbook get the corrected file. Our full method is at /methodology/.

Every figure below is quoted from the vendor’s own page on the date given and carries the row it came from in our dataset. Where we convert a published figure into another period, the arithmetic is printed beside it so you can redo it with your own numbers. A converted figure is ours, not the vendor’s, and is labeled that way every time.

Sources

• ShipCalm pricing details — accessed 2026-08-04; comparison-table figures re-read 2026-08-10
• Launch Fulfillment ecommerce fulfillment pricing — accessed 2026-08-12
• Fulfyld 3PL fulfillment pricing — accessed 2026-08-04
• Flexport Omni-Channel Fulfillment pricing overview — accessed 2026-08-04
• 2026 Flexport Fulfillment pricing FAQs — accessed 2026-08-04
• Amazon FBA storage fee, official notice reproduced in Seller Forums — accessed 2026-08-04; figure confirmed effective 1 April 2024
• Amazon selling pricing page — accessed 2026-08-04; current storage table not extractable, recorded QUOTE_GATED
• ShipBob pricing — accessed 2026-08-04

The providers named above, fee by fee

This guide spans more than one fee category, so rather than a partial list: here is every provider it names that publishes enough of a rate card to have a page, with every figure sourced and dated.

• Flexport 75 published fees across 13 categories
• ShipCalm 35 published fees across 7 categories
• Amazon MCF 31 published fees across 2 categories
• Walmart WFS 26 published fees across 5 categories
• Fulfyld 12 published fees across 5 categories

All published fees by vendor · What a 3PL costs in 2026