Shipping Rate Finder: USPS & UPS Quotes, No Carrier Keys

What does Shipping Rate Finder: USPS & UPS Quotes, No Carrier Keys do?

Shipping Rate Finder prices a US package across USPS and UPS at the same time and gives you every service that quotes it, cheapest first. You do not need a carrier account, a developer key or a shipping software login.

Give it the ZIP Code you ship from, the ZIP Code you ship to, and the weight. For every shipment it returns each service with its price in dollars and the expected delivery date, and picks out the cheapest option overall, the cheapest USPS service and the cheapest UPS service so you can read the answer without opening the list.

It never buys a label, books a pickup or signs in anywhere. It only reads published rates.

Why use it?

• Pick the cheapest way to ship before you buy the label. USPS Ground Advantage, Priority Mail, flat rate boxes, UPS Ground Saver, Ground, 3 Day Select, 2nd Day Air and Next Day Air in one table.
• Quote a whole order sheet at once. Put hundreds of shipments in one run and export the table to a spreadsheet to compare carriers by lane, weight or box size.
• AI agents. Connect it as an MCP server and let an agent answer "what would it cost to ship this?" while it works.

How it works

For each shipment it reads, at the same time:

1. USPS retail prices, straight from USPS
2. Pirate Ship online label prices for USPS and UPS, which are the discounted prices small sellers actually pay, with a delivery date for each service

Every quote is labelled with its carrier and whether it is a retail or a discounted_label price. If one source does not answer in time, the row says so, so a partial quote never looks complete.

Input

Field	Required	Description
shipments	Yes	One entry per package. Each needs fromZip and toZip (5-digit US ZIP Codes) and weight in pounds. Use weightOz for ounces, or a string like "1.5kg". Add length, width and height in inches for an exact price. A line like "94103 10001 3lb 12x9x6" works too.
maxConcurrency	No	Shipments quoted at once, 1 to 8. Default 4.

Example input:

{
  "shipments": [
    { "fromZip": "94103", "toZip": "10001", "weight": 2 },
    { "fromZip": "30303", "toZip": "99501", "weight": 2, "length": 10, "width": 8, "height": 4 },
    "02134 90210 4oz"
  ]
}

Output

One dataset row per shipment. Download it as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or read it through the Apify API.

{
  "fromZip": "02134",
  "toZip": "90210",
  "weightOz": 4,
  "weightLb": 0.25,
  "status": "found",
  "cheapestPrice": 6.23,
  "currency": "USD",
  "cheapestCarrier": "UPS",
  "cheapestService": "UPS Ground Saver",
  "cheapestDelivery": "Estimated delivery Saturday 10/31 by 11:00 PM if shipped today",
  "cheapestUspsPrice": 6.56,
  "cheapestUspsService": "USPS Ground Advantage",
  "cheapestUpsPrice": 6.23,
  "cheapestUpsService": "UPS Ground Saver",
  "rateCount": 17,
  "rates": [
    {
      "carrier": "UPS", "service": "UPS Ground Saver", "price": 6.23, "currency": "USD",
      "priceType": "discounted_label",
      "deliveryEstimate": "Estimated delivery Saturday 10/31 by 11:00 PM if shipped today",
      "transitDays": null, "mediaMailOnly": false
    }
  ],
  "warnings": [],
  "error": null
}

status is found, not_found or error. not_found means both sources answered and no service quoted that package, which is a real answer (too heavy or too large for every service, for example).

rates is every quote, cheapest first. Media Mail is in the list, flagged mediaMailOnly: true, but never counts as the cheapest option, because USPS only allows it for books, discs and other media.

Pricing

$0.001 per shipment, with no monthly fee. A thousand quotes cost one dollar.

• A shipment that comes back not_found is charged, because both sources were still checked.
• A shipment that fails with an error is not charged.
• Set a spending limit on the run and the Actor stops cleanly when it reaches it.
• On Apify's free plan, each run processes the first 10 shipments (10 tool calls per MCP session). Any paid Apify plan removes the limit.

Use it as an MCP server

This Actor also runs as an MCP server with one tool, quote_shipping_rates. Point any MCP client (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, your own agent) at:

https://bowmark-ai--shipping-rate-finder.apify.actor/mcp

with your Apify API token as a bearer token. Each tool call is billed like one shipment in a normal run.

Limits and good practice

• It reads only public rates. It never signs in anywhere and never changes anything.
• US domestic only, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. FedEx is not included.
• Give the box size when you know it. Without it, the online label prices assume a small 10x8x4 inch box, and a bigger box can cost more.
• Prices are for today. Each shipment takes about 5 to 10 seconds.
• Your own negotiated carrier rates may differ from these published prices.

Questions or a wrong result?

Open an issue on the Issues tab with the input you used and what you expected. We read every one.