Published
One of the three. Address validation is free and runs on every plan without you asking for it; insurance is a per-shipment purchase; return labels cost what any label costs, but the returns portal is plan-gated and every return label consumes a shipment from your monthly allowance.
The interesting part is not the headline answer. It is that two of the three have a cost that arrives from somewhere other than ShipStation’s invoice.
ShipStation lists Address Validation among the features every plan includes, and its plan comparison table marks it available on Starter, Standard and Premium alike. There is no add-on, no per-check fee, and nothing to enable.
It also runs whether or not you engage with it. ShipStation documents that it validates every order shipping to or within the supported countries, and auto-corrects domestic and international addresses for those countries. US orders are checked against the USPS address validation database; other supported countries are checked against the Melissa database. As of August 2026 the supported list runs to eleven countries — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Validation always runs on orders to those destinations, though you are not obliged to use the automatic correction.
So the answer is genuinely no, with one caveat that costs real money.
ShipStation validating an address does not stop a carrier charging you to correct it. ShipStation documents the UPS behaviour plainly: if a shipment’s address is incorrect or incomplete, UPS will try to obtain the correct information, and even if an address has been validated, UPS may update it if it cannot be used to complete delivery — with an address correction fee charged to the shipper for any updates made.
That is the part worth internalising. Validation is a check against a postal database, not a guarantee the carrier can deliver. A validated address can still be a wrong apartment number, and the fee for fixing it lands on your invoice weeks later along with the rest of the adjustments.
Insurance is the one that has a real per-shipment price. ShipStation documents three routes: carrier insurance provided by the carrier, ShipStation’s partner provider, or an outside policy you record in ShipStation for your own reference only.
The partner differs by country. US accounts get ParcelGuard; UK, Australian, New Zealand, French, German and Canadian accounts get Total Shipping Protection by XCover.
Both are priced off the Insure Amt. field, and both are paid from your ShipStation Balance rather than your subscription payment method.
ParcelGuard publishes a flat rate per $100 of coverage, and it varies by carrier and destination. As of August 2026: $1.09 for USPS domestic, $1.39 for USPS international, $0.99 for non-USPS domestic, $1.39 for non-USPS international. ShipStation also states enabling ParcelGuard requires nothing beyond activating ShipStation Carriers.
Total Shipping Protection is priced as a percentage. Here ShipStation’s documentation disagrees with itself, and it is worth knowing before you build a threshold around a number. As of August 2026 the Add Insurance to Shipments article, updated more recently, gives 1.25% of the Insure Amt. domestic and 1.75% international, while the Total Shipping Protection partner article gives 1.1% and 1.5%. The partner article also notes the total is calculated to include a label fee on top of the percentage, to cover reshipping.
Both articles point at the same resolution: the Cost Review panel in Configure Shipment shows the actual figure for that shipment before you buy it. Use that rather than either published number.
Here is the arithmetic that matters. A $500 domestic parcel on a non-USPS service, insured through ParcelGuard at the published $0.99 per $100, costs about $4.95 to cover. Declare $300 on the same parcel and it costs about $2.97. Two dollars, and at one parcel that is not worth a conversation.
Now run it at volume. An operation shipping 6,000 orders a month, insuring 5% of them — an assumption, not a figure ShipStation publishes or I can source — is buying 300 policies a month. At the $500 declaration that is roughly $1,485 a month; at $300 it is roughly $891. The gap is about $600 a month riding on a number most people set per order without looking at it.
Which is the real conclusion, and it is the opposite of agonising over each one. The declared amount is not worth thinking about per shipment precisely because it should be decided once, as a rule, and then left alone. Insuring by automation rule is where that decision belongs — the rule chooses whether to insure and what to declare, and the price is the same as it would be by hand. What it removes is 300 individual judgements a month, each one cheap and none of them free.
Confirm the figure in Cost Review before you build a threshold on it. The published rate is a rate card, not a quote.
Return labels themselves carry no ShipStation surcharge. They are labels, billed the way that carrier bills labels — deducted from your balance on creation for a ShipStation Carrier, invoiced monthly by the carrier for your own account. ShipStation’s plan table marks Return Labels available on Starter, Standard and Premium.
Two things do cost, though, and neither appears on a label.
The returns portal is plan-gated. As of August 2026, ShipStation’s plan comparison marks Standard Returns — the non-branded portal — and the Branded Returns and Exchanges Portal as unavailable on Starter and available on Standard and Premium. Returns Reporting and Analytics splits the same way. The Returns article carries the same warning: the feature is not available on all subscription plans and you may need to upgrade. So creating a return label by hand is available to everyone; letting a customer initiate one themselves is not.
Every return consumes a shipment from your monthly allowance. ShipStation states that labels, fulfillments, returns and voided labels all count toward the account shipment limit, and every plan below High Volume caps shipments per billing cycle.
That is the one that surprises people, so here is what it looks like. An operation on a plan with a 2,000-shipment allowance, running a 10% return rate, ships 1,850 outbound orders in a cycle and issues 185 return labels. That is 2,035 shipments against a 2,000 limit, and the plan is exhausted before the outbound volume is. A returns process that reissues a label after a failed pickup, or a warehouse that voids and reprints, pushes it further. None of those extra units are outbound revenue, and none of them are visible in an outbound shipment count.
One further limit on the returns side: ShipStation states return requests must be domestic, and that international return labels are not currently supported.
The three questions have one answer between them. ShipStation charges for the things that are a purchase — insurance coverage, a label, a plan tier — and does not charge for the things that are processing. Validation, correction, the rules engine and the rate comparison come with the account.
What that leaves is a category of cost that is real and belongs to neither column: carrier adjustments. Address correction fees, additional handling, dimension and weight re-rates. Those arrive weeks after the label, on the account that bought it, and no ShipStation setting prevents them.
Nothing here reaches a limit in ShipStation’s automation. Insurance can be applied by rule, returns can be issued by portal or by hand, and validation runs on its own.
What the three have in common is that the costs which actually bite arrive from somewhere other than ShipStation’s invoice. A carrier correction fee on an address ShipStation validated, landing weeks after the label. A plan ceiling reached at 2,035 units when you shipped 1,850 orders, because the 185 return labels counted and nobody was counting them. Neither is a rate. Neither is a setting. Neither appears where you would go looking for it — the first shows up in an adjustment weeks later, the second as a plan you have to upgrade mid-cycle to keep shipping.
Knowing how a carrier prices a package is useful. The harder problem is making the right packing and rate decision on every order, when the correct answer changes with the contents, the destination and the rate card.
String builds and maintains that logic inside existing ShipStation accounts, for operations shipping roughly 6,000 orders a month or more. Below that, ShipStation's native automation and accurate product dimensions will get you most of the way there.
Eight patterns that show up when an operation needs custom shipping logic
