What postage meter do you use?

I'm shopping for postage meters. Glamorous, I know.

We're making a switch from an older Francotyp Postalia machine that can only be reloaded with new postage via POTS line (standard phone line). We recently converted to VoIP, so unless someone takes the machine home to reload it, we need a new solution.

I've looked at a couple of lease deals, and I've looked at buying something outright. We own our current machine, so it's tough to start looking at a lease. Then again, it's tough to look at buying an older used machine for around $1,000.

What are you doing for postage? Do you know of any deals out there? Non profit discounts on leases or purchases? My search skills have failed me on this one.

I have a few thoughts for you:

- If you don't have a POTS line at your location, it may be cost effective to add one, or borrow one from a neighbor so you can reload you meter.

- Or I would look into something that can give you an analog/pots jack into your VOIP equipment.

- There are number of sites like www.PostageMeterResearch.com that have some options.

- Or just search in Google for things like "free postage meters".

To be honest, I didn't think you could buy them, only rent them. Depending on what you need I think you can rent/lease them for something like $20 a month unless you need a really big machine. And for that much money you may be able to just get the phone company to provide a POTS line for your meter. I like having at least one for those times when the Internet goes out... :-)

Depending on how your VOIP is set up, you may have a POTS line for your FAX machine, 911 dialing or Fire Panel support,  you might be able to tap one of those for the limited meter loading.

Dave

Better a Fax machine than 911, Fire Panel, or Security support.

Thanks, everyone.

We don't need to keep the POTS for emergency services, but we may be able to have the local university take over the line and provide it back to us for free. That'd be nice. Now I'm looking at potentially keeping the line for the old-school fax. We've been using myfax.com, but I recently saw some of their output and it's pretty bad. Basically unreadable. So I'm reconsidering that particular "cost saving" move.

Anyway, I'm looking into stamps.com now, as an alternative to a leased meter. No new equipment needed, it's way cheaper than a lease, and it can hook directly into our database via ODBC (if we spring for the upgraded service package). We'll see how it goes.

We use myfax.com and don't have any problems with clarity.  Are you sure the originals were in good shape?  Have you done your own testing with a sending fax machine that you know is clean with a clean crisp original paper?  Truly, I have had a good experience with them.  The only thing I don't like about getting my faxes via email is that you lose the "confidentiality" of the transfer.  If both fax machines are on telco lines, its a direct connection between the two of them.  As soon as you send it unencrypted via email, the information has a much greater risk of being exposed - so I can't have my clients fax me sensitive data.