Pricing
How our pricing works
We have a rate card — we just quote from it against your actual order profile rather than publishing it. Here is exactly what you will be billed for, so you can compare our quote to anyone else’s.
Minimus Fulfillment quotes from a standard rate card, applied to your actual order profile. Every quote itemizes the same things: storage, order pick and pack, additional items per order, packaging materials, shipping, and any value-added work. Receiving is free. There is no long-term contract and no hard order minimum — most clients ship hundreds to thousands of orders a day, and we will also take on a smaller brand that is clearly scaling.
What you get billed for
| Line item | What drives it | What to watch for elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| Receiving | Unloading, checking against the packing list, and putting away. Free at Minimus — it is not a line item on your invoice. | Providers who bill receiving by the pallet, carton or hour, which adds up quickly on a container. |
| Storage | The space your inventory occupies, billed monthly by pallet or shelf position. | Minimum storage commitments that keep billing after you have drawn inventory down. |
| Pick and pack | The base cost of pulling and packing an order, including the first item. | A low headline pick rate paired with a high per-additional-item rate. |
| Additional items | Each item in an order beyond the first. | Multi-item orders that quietly cost triple what the headline rate implied. |
| Packaging materials | Cartons, mailers, void fill, tape. Standard materials or your custom packaging. | Materials billed at retail rather than cost-plus. |
| Shipping | Postage and freight. We ship on our FedEx national account, plus USPS, LTL and an international consolidator. | Undisclosed markups on carrier rates, and dimensional weight surprises from bad product data. |
| Value-added work | Kitting, assembly, labeling, retail compliance prep, returns processing, customer service. | Per-touch charges that were never quoted because the work was never discussed. |
What makes your number go up or down
- Items per order. A one-item order is dramatically cheaper to fulfill than a six-item order. Your average basket matters more than your order count.
- Size and weight. Both storage and shipping scale with cube. Accurate product dimensions are why we weigh and measure everything during onboarding.
- SKU count relative to volume. Forty SKUs across 400 orders a month costs more to hold and pick than four SKUs across the same volume.
- How your product arrives. Receiving is free either way, but palletized freight moves into stock faster than a floor-loaded container.
- Pack-out complexity. A poly mailer is not a branded box with tissue, an insert and a handwritten note. Both are fine; they are not the same line item.
- DTC versus B2B mix. Case and pallet work prices differently from single-order picking.
What we need to quote you accurately
- Order volume Monthly orders today, and what you expect in six months.
- Average items per order And your best and worst case.
- SKU list with dimensions and weights Estimates are fine to start.
- Product type Especially if it is food, supplement, organic or fragile.
- Channel mix DTC, wholesale, Amazon, retail, and which platforms.
- Special handling Kitting, inserts, gift notes, serial or lot capture, returns.
Send those and you will get a written quote with every line named. If something about your program would make us a bad fit, we would rather find it during quoting than during your peak season.
A note on comparing 3PL quotes
The cheapest headline pick-and-pack rate frequently produces the highest invoice. When you compare providers, price a real order — your actual average basket, in your actual box, to a real customer address — all the way through, including shipping. That number is the only one that means anything.
Common questions
How much does 3PL fulfillment cost?
For most brands the all-in cost lands somewhere between a few dollars and the high single digits per order, before shipping, depending on how many items are in the order, how big and heavy they are, and how much handling the pack-out needs. Storage is billed separately by the space you use, and receiving is free. We work from a standard rate card and quote it against your actual order profile rather than publishing numbers that would be wrong for most readers — and we itemize the quote, so you can compare it line by line with whatever you have now.
What are the line items in a 3PL invoice?
Typically: receiving, storage, order pick and pack, additional items within an order, packaging materials, shipping, and any value-added work such as kitting, labeling or returns. At Minimus receiving is free, so it will not appear on yours. A good quote names every line up front — surprise charges appearing at invoice time is the most common complaint brands bring to us about a previous provider.
Do you have order minimums?
No hard minimum. Most of our clients ship hundreds to thousands of orders a day, which is where the operation is built to run and where the economics work best for both sides. We will also take on a brand at 10–20 orders a day when it is clearly on the way up — something national networks generally will not do. B2B volume counts on an equivalent case-touch basis, and a client can be entirely B2B.
Is there a long-term contract?
No. No multi-year term and no exit penalty.
Do you mark up shipping?
We ship on our own FedEx national account, which gets most brands materially better rates than they can get on their own, and we are straightforward about how postage and freight are billed. We will walk through it with you during quoting so there is nothing to discover later.
Do you charge for receiving inventory?
No. Receiving is free at Minimus. Most 3PLs bill it by the pallet, carton or hour, which adds up quickly when a container lands, so it is worth checking on any quote you compare us against.
Is there a deposit?
For most accounts, yes. New accounts typically fund a deposit that covers shipping and services in advance, sized to the account’s expected volume. We will tell you the number during quoting.
Last reviewed: September 2026
Get a line-by-line quote.
Tell us your volume, your basket and what you sell. We will send back a written quote you can hold up against the one you already have.