Letters and the Craft
How Much Does a Historical Letter Subscription Cost?
Historical letter subscription cost varies more by geography than by content. Across established services, a year of letters runs from about 7 to 13 dollars per letter, with the lowest prices going to services posted inside the buyer’s own country. International postage has cost more than domestic postage since well before the postage stamp existed, and that gap is still the main thing setting the price today.
What historical letter subscription cost looks like across the category
Three American services anchor the category, and their current prices are worth naming plainly. History By Mail charges $8.99 a month for a single replica document with a context sheet explaining who wrote it and why it mattered. Letterjoy’s shortest package is $49 for two months and eight or more letters, and its year-long package is just under $250 for 52 or more letters, each with an accompanying article called the Postscript. The Flower Letters prices its story subscriptions at around $12 to $13 a month for two letters and occasional extras, with a cheaper prepaid annual option advertised but not itemised on the product page.
Set those figures beside each other and the range holds fairly steady: somewhere between about 7 and 13 dollars a letter, and all three posted inside the United States on domestic postage. That is the benchmark any letter subscription price should be measured against, and it is worth checking again before you buy, since subscription boxes change their bundles often.
Why crossing an ocean has always cost more
Overseas postage is not a modern markup. When the United States and Britain settled their postal treaty rates in the years after 1848, a half-ounce letter crossing between the two countries cost 24 cents, the equivalent of 1 shilling paid on the British side. Compare that with the domestic United States rate of the same years: 5 cents to send a letter under 300 miles, 10 cents beyond that. A transatlantic letter could cost between 2 and 5 times as much as one that never left the country, and the rate held for 20 years, until a new postal convention cut it to 12 cents in 1868.
That gap explains most of what still separates a domestically posted letter subscription from one posted from Ireland. The ocean has never been the cheap part of the journey.
The volume behind those figures tells its own story. Mayo County Library’s local history record puts the number of letters sent from Ireland to America in 1854 alone at around 1 million, part of a nineteenth-century remittance flow later reckoned at €260 million sent home. Whatever any single family actually paid for a stamp, the letter itself was judged worth the cost.
The high rate also paid for infrastructure that had not existed a generation earlier. Cunard’s government mail contract for the Liverpool run was renewed in 1850 at £178,340 a year, funding weekly sailings on paddle steamers built specifically to keep the mail moving to a fixed schedule. A reliable sailing date each week was itself a service worth paying for, since irregular, wind-dependent packet crossings had been the norm before steam took over the Atlantic mail.
What historians cannot know
The postal treaty rate is well documented, but it describes what the post office charged, not what any single emigrant family actually handed over. Many nineteenth-century letters travelled unpaid, with postage collected from the recipient rather than the sender, which is one reason surviving covers show a mix of paid and unpaid markings rather than one clean price. The 1854 figure of 1 million letters is a single, well-cited year, and the record does not give an equally solid count for 1847 or 1848, the worst years of the exodus, when fewer families could spare the price of a stamp in the first place. Anyone quoting a precise average cost per letter across the whole decade is smoothing over a record that is patchy before the 1850s and better documented after it. Archives such as the Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster American Folk Park hold thousands of individual emigrant letters, but even a large collection is a sample of what survived a century and a half of attics and house clearances, not a census of what was actually written or posted.
What the price of a letter subscription typically covers
Across the category, the number on the checkout page is rarely for a single item. History By Mail’s monthly charge includes the replica and its context document. Letterjoy’s packages include a Postscript article with each letter and free first-class postage inside the United States. The Flower Letters folds a postcard into alternating mailings. A subscription built as an exchange between two correspondents, or one that crosses an ocean rather than staying inside a single postal system, is a different shape of product, and the letter subscription price should be read against what actually arrives rather than the sticker figure alone.
You can judge that for yourself before spending anything: the opening letters are free to read in full.
Comparing letter subscription cost across services
So how much do story letters cost once everything included is counted, rather than just the number at checkout? Work out the per-letter figure first, then ask three questions. Is the postage domestic or international, since that remains the single biggest swing factor, then and now. Does the price include context, a reply, or both, since a service sending one document is answering a different question than one sending a correspondence. And does the billing have a fixed end, or does it renew on its own until you cancel it.
Bundle discounts follow a consistent shape across the category, too. The longer commitment is nearly always priced lower per letter than the short one, whether that is Letterjoy’s year-long package against its two-month starter, or The Flower Letters’ prepaid annual option against its standard rolling rate. That pattern is a reason to look past the headline number to the per-letter arithmetic before deciding anything.
Current pricing and billing terms for our own letters are answered in full on the frequently asked questions page, and the value case for paying more to have letters posted from Ireland is worked through separately in whether a letter subscription is worth it.
Prices in this category shift slowly rather than suddenly, so treat every figure above, historical letter subscription cost included, as worth checking again on the day you actually buy.
Sources and further reading
- TNGenNet Inc., TNGenWeb, “Early United States Domestic Postal Rates”, for the 1847 domestic US letter rates of 5 cents under 300 miles and 10 cents beyond.
- Postal History Sunday (Rob Faux), “US to England, 1867/68”, for the 24-cent transatlantic treaty rate that held from 1848 to 1867 and its reduction to 12 cents in 1868.
- TPO & Seapost Society, “Cunard Packet History”, for the 1-shilling (24-cent) Britain-to-USA half-ounce rate and Cunard’s Liverpool-New York/Boston packet service.
- Mayo County Council Library Service, “Letters in Ireland” (local history collection), for the estimate of roughly 1 million letters sent from Ireland to America in 1854 and the nineteenth-century remittance total.
- History By Mail, Letterjoy, and The Flower Letters, subscription pricing pages, consulted August 2026, for current category pricing.