pitney bowes postage meter rental
Insider Secret #4:
This secret typically pertains more-so to someone looking for small postage machines rather than large ones with many features.
POSTAGE METER RENTAL is better than a LEASE!
All suppliers of postage meters – Pitney Bowes, Neopost, Hasler, and FP Mailing – offer different financial ways to provide postage machines to customers. As a customer you can “RENT” or “LEASE” the system. In most cases a salesperson will give you lease prices and no options. That’s because he gets a sale and a commission on the retail value of the system. On a rental he would make a fraction of what he gets for a lease.
Pitney Bowes postage meter rental (or any manufacturer’s) in the simplest terms means you never really own or have the option of owning the system. You merely get to use it for a specified period of time – typically 36 months.
Leasing gives you the option to actually own postage machines at the end of the lease for some specified or unspecified amount.
For almost all small businesses there is no benefit to leasing postage machines. To show you why let’s look at what’s included or not included in a lease – and some dollar estimates for a “LEASE” on a small hand feed machine:
- Machine cost …….…..…. $54
- Meter (portion) Rental …. $25
- Maintenance ……………..$10
- Postage Rate Updates …$ 5
- TOTAL …………………..… $95 per month
At the end of the lease – in this case 63 month – you get the option of keeping the machine usually for “x% of fair market value” or in some cases – a “$1 buyout”. This option is sort of irrelevant because if you chose a ”$1buyout” at the beginning of the lease, your monthly payments would be more than with a “fair market value” option in this example. You pay – one way or another.
“Fair market value” is determined by the leasing company. So after paying nearly $100 bucks a month for over 5 years, you get the option of keeping the machine for essentially how much the leasing company wants to charge you!
And that’s just the beginning and this is important. Owning the machine doesn’t mean there’s no more monthly costs. You still have to pay for everything other than the Machine Cost (i.e. Meter Rental, Maintenance, and Postal Rate Updates) which was included in your lease payment – and usually at higher rates. Meter rental can more than double. Maintenance agreement costs can be set by local dealers and escalate every year. Postage rate changes for the meter can be several hundred dollars per occurrence.
A “RENTAL” of the same piece of equipment like the one I’m using in this example is $49, including the postage meter rental … and since it’s owned by the manufacturer, they maintain it.
So that’s typically, your total cost and only for 36 months! Some manufacturers have started billing customers for rate changes after the first year, but see if you can get that included when you do sign your agreement. If not, it’s still a small amount compared to what you pay for “owned equipment”.
If you ever had to pay for postage machines for longer than 3 years, you know there typically is some reason that it needs to be replaced anyway (wear-and-tear, technical obsolescence, etc.). So, when possible, check out pitney bowes postage meter rental – not leasing.
You can cut your costs almost in half!
