The advertised answer is small. Base plans at the big virtual address providers commonly start under ten dollars a month, popular tiers sit in the teens through the forties, and prestige addresses with a staffed suite behind them climb past fifty. All of those numbers are real, and none of them is what you will actually pay, because the subscription mostly covers one function: receiving your mail at a street address that stays put.
The rest of the bill depends on what happens to that mail after it arrives. Every scan beyond an allowance, every envelope shipped onward, every check walked to a bank, and every parcel that sits past a free storage window can carry its own charge. Those line items vary far more between providers than the headline price does, and they are where the pricing complaints in this industry actually come from. We read more than a hundred of those complaints before setting our own prices, and the pattern was consistent: people rarely felt misled about the monthly fee, and often felt ambushed by everything around it. So here is the whole bill, item by item, including exactly what we charge for each line.
What the advertised price actually covers
A virtual address is a subscription to a real delivery point. A provider, operating as a commercial mail receiving agency under the postal standards, receives mail addressed to you at its street address, logs it, and shows it to you online. The base plan generally covers the address itself, receipt of some volume of mail, and some level of scanning, either photographs of the outside of each envelope or full scans of the contents.
The included volume is where base plans quietly differ. One plan's ten dollars might cover thirty incoming pieces with exterior photos only, while another covers unlimited receiving but meters every content scan. Two plans with the same sticker price can produce very different bills for the same mail, which is the first reason quoted costs for this product scatter so widely.
The second reason is that "virtual address" names at least three different products. At the low end, a mailbox plan gives you an address on a shared facility and handles mail, with advertised entry prices that start around five dollars a month. In the middle, virtual office bundles attach conference room hours or phone answering to the address. At the top, suite plans at a staffed business center rent you an address that doubles as a leased-office identity, which is what the fifty to two hundred dollar quotes are usually describing. Pricing research that mixes the three produces the contradictory ranges you have probably already seen. Decide which product you need first. If the answer is "my mail handled and a stable address on my filings," you are pricing the first one, and this guide is about that product.
The line items that arrive after you sign up
These are the charges that live below the headline price. Not every provider bills every line, which is exactly why the list is worth taking into a sales page.
| Line item | What it is | How it is commonly billed |
|---|---|---|
| Content scans | Opening your mail and scanning the pages | An included allowance, then a fee per piece or per page |
| Forwarding | Shipping mail onward to you | Postage plus a handling fee, per shipment |
| Check deposit | Sending a check into your bank | A fee per check |
| Storage | Holding physical mail after a free window | A daily or monthly fee per item |
| Extra names or users | More recipients or logins on one box | A monthly fee per name or per seat |
| Identity setup | USPS Form 1583 verification | One time, through a notary or the operator's live video check |
Content scans are the meter that runs fastest. A business address receives more than you expect: bank notices, state mail, insurance offers, the occasional government letter that genuinely matters. If your plan includes a fixed number of opened pieces, find out what the next piece costs and whether unused allowance rolls over. Our plan includes 30 pieces a month, every one of them opened and scanned with no separate scan fee, and each additional piece is $3 with the allowance resetting each billing cycle.
Forwarding is the line item with a structural reason behind it. The postal standards keep USPS from forwarding mail that is addressed to you at a mail receiving agency. When you want a physical envelope in your hands, your operator packages it and buys new postage, every time, which is why forwarding is priced per shipment almost everywhere in the industry rather than bundled invisibly. What varies is the margin added on top of that postage. We charge a $2 handling fee per shipment and pass postage through at cost, with no margin on the shipping itself. We wrote a separate piece on why USPS forwarding and mailbox forwarding are different products, and the short version is that one is a temporary redirect and the other is a permanent destination with a per-use shipping cost.
Check deposits matter more than founders expect, because plenty of US businesses still get paid by paper check. Deposit services are commonly billed per check, and the fee structures vary enough that this line deserves a direct question before you sign. Ours is a flat $2 per check, with no percentage of the amount and no monthly minimum. Where your bank supports remote deposit we deposit electronically, and otherwise we mail the check to your bank with postage included in the fee.
Storage is a clock, and the clock matters more than the fee. Every provider has to do something with physical mail you have already read online, so plans set a free holding window and charge, or dispose, after it. Ask what the window is, what happens when it ends, and whether anything is destroyed without warning. We store letters and packages for 30 days, shred letters and discard packages free of charge after that, and email you before anything is destroyed so you can have it forwarded instead. Legal and tax mail is never destroyed automatically. Someone contacts you first, every time.
Extra names and users show up the moment a co-founder wants access or your LLC and your own name both receive mail. Some plans price per recipient name, some per login. On our plan, recipient names are unlimited, one user login is included, and each additional user is $20 a month with no cap on how many you can add.
Identity setup is the one-time line. Federal postal rules require a completed USPS Form 1583 before a mail receiving agency may handle your mail, and the form has to be witnessed. The postal standards allow two routes: a live session with the operator itself, in person or on a real-time video call, or an acknowledgment before a notary holding a US commission. Which route your provider offers decides whether this line costs money or only a few minutes. Ask how they run it, and if you are outside the US, ask specifically how they handle foreign customers, because the form's identity rules are where most rejected applications happen.
How to price any provider in ten minutes
Skip the plan comparison table and price your own mail instead. Estimate your monthly volume of meaningful mail, guess high, and then walk one month of it through a provider's full fee schedule: pieces received, pieces opened and scanned, one forwarding shipment, one check if you expect paper payments, and one package that sits for six weeks because you were traveling. The plan with the higher sticker price wins this exercise surprisingly often.
Then get the schedule itself in writing before you hand over a government ID. A provider that publishes its fee schedule and its limits in advance is telling you what the relationship will be like. One that reveals fees at the moment of use is also telling you, in a different way. The complaints we catalogued while designing our own fee policy cluster on exactly this point: the bill people resent is almost never the subscription, it is the charge nobody mentioned until it appeared.
The five numbers to demand, in one place: the cost of the next scan after your allowance, the forwarding fee and whether postage carries a margin, the check deposit fee, the storage window and the rate after it, and the treatment of mail that arrives after you cancel. That last one is the question nobody asks at signup and everybody asks at cancellation.
What we charge, since we sell one of these
Auteur Mailbox is one plan at $19 a month or $190 a year. It includes 30 pieces of mail a month, each one opened and scanned, with additional pieces at $3. Forwarding is $2 per shipment plus postage at cost. Check deposit is a flat $2 per check. Storage and shredding are included, unlimited recipient names are included, and additional user logins are $20 a month. Form 1583 witnessing happens on a live video call with us during signup, so the one-time notary line is absent from our bill. The complete fee schedule, including the limits and the things we decline to handle, is published in our fair use policy so you can read the entire relationship before you sign anything.
Our price sits above the cheapest advertised plans on purpose. The allowance is bigger than typical entry tiers, scanning is not metered separately, and the fee schedule is short enough to read in three minutes. Auteur Mailbox is in pre-launch, and reserving a spot is free.
Frequently asked questions
Does the IRS accept a virtual address? IRS forms ask for a mailing address where you reliably receive correspondence, and a street address at a commercial mail receiving agency is a real delivery point that can fill that role. Which address belongs in which field is the longer question, since different filings ask for mailing, physical, and business locations separately, and our guide to business mailing addresses walks through the slots one by one.
Will a bank accept a virtual address? Banks collect a physical address under their customer identification rules, and how they treat a mailbox address varies by institution and by how the rest of your file looks. The regulation, the failure points, and the practical routes are specific enough that we covered them in their own piece.
What are the drawbacks of using a virtual address? The recurring, documented complaint in this industry is billing surprise rather than address failure: fees that appear at the moment of use, storage charges on mail people forgot, and cancellation friction. We read a hundred-plus public complaints and published what we found, then wrote our fee policy against that list.
Is a PO Box cheaper than a virtual address? Usually, and for purely personal mail it can be the right tool. As a business address it gets rejected in specific, predictable places, from state filings to bank applications, and we mapped exactly where before you spend the smaller number and discover the limits.
Why is there a notary involved in getting a virtual address? Because USPS Form 1583, the authorization every mail receiving agency must keep on file, has to be witnessed. A notary with a US commission is one accepted route. The postal standards equally accept a live witnessing session with the operator itself, in person or on a real-time video call, which is how some providers, ours included, take the notary step out of the process. The identity documents have strict rules on either route, and the common rejection reasons are avoidable if you know them going in.
Bottom line
Price this product in two layers. The subscription buys you a stable street address and some amount of handling. The usage fees decide the real total, and they reward ten minutes of reading a fee schedule more than any amount of comparing sticker prices. A provider that shows you every number before signup has priced the product honestly at any tier. Our numbers are public, and the plan they belong to is $19 a month.
If you are pricing an address on the Canadian side of the border, the comparison runs against office leases under different rules, and we did that math separately.
