Do 3PLs publish pricing? Five ways they don't

“Just get quotes and compare them” assumes the quotes are comparable. Before you can even test that assumption you need something more basic: a published number to compare against. We maintain a dataset of 241 sourced fee rows across 23 fulfillment operations — 20 third-party logistics providers plus Amazon FBA, Amazon MCF and Walmart WFS. Of those rows, 214 carry a dollar figure and 27 record that we found no public dollar figure to record. Every row carries its source URL and the date it was read. Re-reading a sample of those pages on 10 August 2026 turned up something more interesting than we were looking for.

For ten of the 23 we could not locate a published dollar figure of the vendor’s own. That part is well known. What is less well known is that the thirteen who do publish fall short in four distinct ways, and none of those four is the “quote-gated” mode everyone already expects. If you have been assuming that a vendor with a pricing page has given you a price, here is what that page is actually doing.

The company-by-company version of this — who publishes across three or more fee categories, who publishes in one or two, and who publishes nothing — is a live table at who actually publishes their rates, derived from the same dataset.

1. The page disagrees with itself

ShipCalm shows different prices at different screen widths. The page’s own stylesheet hides one set of price blocks at 768px and wider and another set below that, so the figures you read depend on how wide your window is. At 768px and wider (typically desktop and tablet) it shows $2.65 per DTC order, $1.45/week per SKU and $0.19/week per cubic foot of storage. Below 768px (typically a phone held upright) the same URL shows $2.45, $1.25 and $0.18, with a lower pallet fee ($16.95 against $19.95), oversize surcharge ($0.10 against $0.12 per lb) and receiving fees ($37.50 against $39.50 per shipment, $11.95 against $12.45 per pallet). The narrow layout also leaves out lines the wide one prints, among them outbound pallet prep and the penalties for arriving without an ASN or an appointment. The Pro plan is $999/week on its plan card at every width, $995/week in the comparison table at 1025px and wider, and $895/week in that table’s narrower version. We first recorded the second set of figures on 10 August as “the comparison table”, without noticing the width split. On 11 September we read the page’s breakpoint rules directly. Our dataset records the figure shown at 768px and wider and notes the other in the row, and wherever this site quotes a ShipCalm figure, that is the one it quotes.

MyFBAPrep lists its Standard prep tier at $1.00 per unit at a 5,000 units/month minimum in the tier description, and at $0.95 per unit at the same 5,000 units/month in the feature comparison matrix.

The innocent explanation is a stale table nobody updated, and that is probably what happened in both cases. It does not help you. The SKU-management gap is $0.20 per SKU per week — 14% of the higher figure. On the 140-SKU profile we use throughout our comparisons that is $1,456 a year, because the fee is billed weekly and the multiplier is 52, not 12. You have no way to know which figure the invoice will use until it arrives.

We record the primary figure in both cases and note the disagreement rather than resolving it silently.

2. Published, then disclaimed

Launch Fulfillment publishes a full set: $2.50 per order, $0.75–1.25 per item picked, $0.40–0.60 per cubic foot storage, $2.00 per return, $1.50–3.00 per kit. Every one of those figures is labeled by the vendor as sample or illustrative.

That is more honest than it sounds — they are telling you the number is not a commitment. It is also unusable as a comparison input, because a figure the vendor has expressly not committed to is not a rate. We keep these rows and flag them, because knowing a vendor sits in the $2.50-per-order neighborhood is worth something, and pretending it is a quote is worth less than nothing.

3. Published for some fees, blank for the rest

Simple Global prices its small bin from $0.90 a month and its pallet at up to $25, and publishes hourly rates for value-added work — $38 an hour for basic work orders, $48 for complex ones. Beyond those hourly rates, its setup fee, packaging, order minimums, kitting flat rate, returns fee and account management fee are not on the pricing page. Pick and pack is published as “up to $1.75” per order — a ceiling with no floor.

A ceiling and a floor are not estimates. Simple Global’s “up to $1.75” tells you nothing about the bottom of its pick fee, and its “from $0.90” tells you nothing about the top of its storage bill. Simpl Fulfillment — a different company, despite the name — publishes its base order fee as “from $7.00”, which tells you nothing about the top of that. None of them converts into a number you can compare without inventing the missing half. Our workbook brackets these rather than guessing a midpoint, which is the only defensible thing to do with them.

4. The change is announced; the rate card is not

This is the one that matters most if you are a small brand.

Flexport published a 2026 pricing FAQ announcing that its minimum monthly fulfillment spend rises from $500 to $5,000 and its daily minimum storage charge per DSKU rises from $0.01 to $0.10 — a tenfold increase in both. The FAQ does not publish the rate card those minimums attach to. It says the list rate card “was linked in the price change communications” and points you at the Seller Portal.

Read that as an operator. A $5,000 monthly minimum is a floor of $60,000 a year before a single order ships. Flexport does not publish the per-order rate that minimum attaches to — our own dataset records its domestic outbound fulfillment fee as quote-gated — so sizing the threshold means using cards that are published. Our worked example prices four of them against a 2,000-order/month profile and lands between $4.33 an order (ShipCalm, before postage) and $8.32 (Fulfyld, all-in). At 2,000 orders that is $8,700 to $16,600 a month, which clears $5,000 on any of the four. At 500 orders it is $2,200 to $4,200, which clears it on none — that brand pays $5,000 regardless, an effective $10 an order before the 3PL has done anything differently.

Because the $5,000 minimum is flat, it does not raise prices evenly: a brand already spending above it sees no change from it, while a brand below it pays the difference. What that means for who Flexport ends up serving is not something the FAQ addresses, and we are not asserting it.

That is a decision a small brand needs to make now, and it was communicated as a FAQ line about minimums rather than as a rate card.

5. No figure at all

For ten of the 23 we could not locate any published dollar figure of the vendor’s own — no per-order fee, no storage rate, no receiving cost — on the pages we checked on the dates listed. They are listed, with sources, in the hidden fees guide. One of the ten publishes third-party industry averages on its blog but no rates of its own. An eleventh, ShipBob, sits just the other side of the line: of its eleven rows in our dataset, ten are quote-gated and the only numeric one is a $0 platform fee. Of the thirteen that do publish something, six publish no storage figure at all.

We record these as quote-gated rather than omitting them, because “we could not find a published rate for this vendor” is itself a finding. It tells you the comparison will have to be built from quotes you extract, and it tells you which vendors will give you no number at all until you ask for one.

What this means for a comparison

Every one of these five failure modes produces the same practical result: you cannot rank fulfillment vendors on their published numbers. Not because the numbers are wrong, but because they are not the same kind of object. One is a firm rate, one is a sample, one is a ceiling, one is a minimum with no rate attached, and one does not exist.

The only way through is to normalize everything against one order profile, bracket what is genuinely unknown instead of inventing a midpoint, and keep the source and date on every figure so you can check it when the invoice disagrees.

What to do next

1. Before you request a quote, write down which of the five modes each shortlisted vendor is in. It tells you what to ask for. A ceiling-only vendor needs a floor; a sample-rate vendor needs a commitment; a quote-gated vendor needs the whole card.
2. Ask every vendor for the unit, not just the amount. Per week and per month differ by 4.333, and that single conversion is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in this exercise.
3. Ask for the minimum in writing, separately from the rate. Section 4 is what happens when the minimum moves and the rate card does not.
4. Normalize against one order profile. Our apples-to-apples method walks four published cards through it end to end.

Stop normalizing quotes by hand. The 3PL Quote Normalizer Kit brackets ceilings and floors instead of guessing midpoints, converts weekly to monthly correctly, and ships with our full sourced benchmark table. Get 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. Every figure was read on a specific date and vendors change prices without notice — that is the entire problem being described.

Our dataset was collected on 2026-08-04. On 2026-08-10 we re-read the pages behind the self-contradicting figures in section 1 — ShipCalm’s and MyFBAPrep’s — and each of those four rows records that second read, with its date, in the row’s own notes. On 2026-09-11 ShipCalm’s second set of figures was traced to the page’s narrow-screen layouts (and, for the $895 Pro figure, the narrower version of its comparison table), and the affected ShipCalm rows now say which screen widths show which figure.

Two Flexport rows changed the same day for a different reason: they had recorded a price range where the source announces a single increase, so they were reshaped to hold the new amount, the amount it replaced, and the date the vendor’s change took effect. That came from reconciling our own two records of Flexport against each other, not from a fresh read of Flexport’s page, so those rows keep their 2026-08-04 read date. We are telling you which of the two it was because “re-verified” should mean somebody looked at the source again, and here only half of it does.

Every other row keeps its 2026-08-04 read date and has not been individually re-read since. 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.

Figures are quoted from the vendor’s own page on the date given and cross-checked against our dataset. Where we draw a conclusion from a figure rather than reporting it, we say so in the sentence. Where a vendor’s page disagrees with itself, both figures are quoted and neither is called the “real” one.

Sources

• ShipCalm pricing details — accessed 2026-08-04, re-read 2026-08-10 (the second figures then attributed to a comparison table), both screen-width layouts read 2026-09-11
• MyFBAPrep pricing overview — accessed 2026-08-04, comparison matrix re-read 2026-08-10
• Launch Fulfillment ecommerce fulfillment pricing — accessed 2026-08-04
• Simple Global pricing — accessed 2026-08-04
• Simpl Fulfillment pricing — accessed 2026-08-04
• 2026 Flexport Fulfillment pricing FAQs — accessed 2026-08-04
• Flexport Omni-Channel Fulfillment pricing overview — accessed 2026-08-04
• ShipBob pricing — accessed 2026-08-04
• Red Stag Fulfillment get pricing — accessed 2026-08-04
• Fulfyld 3PL fulfillment 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
• MyFBAPrep 8 published fees across 3 categories
• Simple Global 8 published fees across 5 categories

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