Every shipping API blog post opens the same way: “we’re cheaper than the competition.” Fine. But cheap is still not free, and most of you reading this are bootstrapping a Shopify store, shipping an MVP, or stitching together a side project with a budget that rounds to zero. So let’s skip the marketing dance.
For the next few months, we’re giving away 3 months of paid tracking — USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and 30+ other carriers — to anyone who writes one short post about WhereParcel. Two hundred words. One screenshot. We’ll cheerfully accept less.
Yes, this is a marketing post. No, we’re not pretending it isn’t.
Skip ahead to “How to claim” if you don’t need the math.
The cost problem nobody talks about loudly
You need to show your customers where their package is. Every e-commerce checkout, every D2C brand, every Shopify app eventually runs into this. The options:
Option 1 — Build it yourself. USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL all have official APIs. Sounds easy. Then you discover:
- USPS uses a different XML format than the docs claim
- UPS rotates OAuth tokens in ways that will surprise you
- FedEx response codes don’t always match what they document
- DHL has three different APIs depending on which subsidiary you’re talking to
- And that’s just the four big ones — your customers also ship via regional carriers you’ve never heard of
A junior dev quotes you 2 weeks. It takes 6. Six months later you’re still patching XML edge cases at 11pm.
Option 2 — Pay AfterShip, Ship24, EasyPost, etc. The big aggregators charge $100 to $500/month for what is, fundamentally, a wrapper around the same carrier APIs you could call yourself. For a side project earning $0/month, that’s not a business expense — that’s a non-starter.
Option 3 — Use us, and pay roughly 1/10 of that. Our top plan covers 300,000 lookups/month. AfterShip charges that for one tier where you’re rate-limited at lower volumes. We’re not magic — we just don’t have a huge sales team to feed. Same carriers, same data, much smaller bill.
Today the bill drops to $0 for 3 months. Read on.
What you actually get
Sign up, pick a plan, check one box at checkout, and you get:
| Plan | Monthly lookups | Free for | Equivalent retail value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter ($49/mo) | 10,000 | 3 months (default) | ~$147 |
| Pro ($99/mo) | 30,000 | ~6 weeks | ~$148 |
| Growth ($250/mo) | 100,000 | ~2.5 weeks | ~$150 |
| Scale ($450/mo) | 200,000 | ~10 days | (similar value) |
The default reward is 3 months on Starter — about $147 of value. We scale the duration on higher plans so the total dollar value stays roughly the same. Pick the plan that matches your actual usage — not the one with the longest free period. We’re not gaming you into the wrong tier.
What’s covered:
- ✅ All carriers — USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, plus 30+ regional and international ones
- ✅ Webhook notifications (no polling)
- ✅ Single unified JSON response across carriers
- ✅ Real-time status updates
- ✅ Production-ready API keys, rate limits, the works
No “limited features during trial.” It’s the actual paid plan.
What we want in return (the “catch”)
You write a short post about us. That’s it. We tried to make this as low-effort as we could, because honestly — we know writing reviews is a chore. So we’ll happily reward you for:
- 📸 One photo — a screenshot of our docs, your dashboard, a tracking response, a code snippet. Anything.
- 📋 A paragraph copied from our blog — go to whereparcel.com/blog, grab any paragraph that’s relevant, paste it. We genuinely don’t mind. We want you to do this.
- 💬 2 to 5 lines of your own comment — your honest take. “Tried it for my Shopify store. Took 5 minutes to integrate. Saved me $150/mo over AfterShip.” That’s literally enough.
- 🏷️ A few hashtags — pick 3 to 5 from
#package-tracking-api,#usps-api,#ups-api,#fedex-api,#shipping-api,#aftership-alternative,#shopify-tracking,#multi-carrier-api.
Post it anywhere that’s publicly accessible: your blog, Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, LinkedIn, Reddit, Hacker News, Qiita, Zenn, X / Twitter thread — it all counts.
That’s the whole deal. Five minutes if you’re slow.
One condition we can’t bend on: keep the post published for the full duration of your reward. 3 months of Starter = post stays up for 3 months. 12 months of Starter = post stays up for 12 months. That’s the whole reason this works for both of us — taking it down early may pause the remaining reward. After the reward period ends, you’re free to take it down whenever you like, but we’d genuinely appreciate it if you leave it up. It costs you nothing and it keeps helping us.
If you write something detailed and high-traffic (a real walkthrough with code, a comparison post, a video) — we extend the reward to 6, 12, even 24+ months. We don’t hold back for great content. But the floor is a casual mention.
Why we’re doing this (honestly)
We’re small. AfterShip raised over $80M. Ship24 has been around for years. We have a tiny team, a much better price, and almost no awareness. Posts from real users move the needle for us in a way our own marketing never could.
If we paid Google for the traffic this campaign costs us, the per-signup acquisition cost would be wildly higher than 3 months of Starter. Giving you the plan directly is just better economics for both sides — you get a real product to use for free, we get a real post in front of a real audience.
This isn’t a bait-and-switch. The plan is the actual paid plan. You don’t have to write the post before getting the trial. You don’t even have to write it at all if you change your mind — we just won’t extend the reward. No clawback. No gotcha.
How to claim, step by step
- Sign up at whereparcel.com (Google login is fine).
- Pick a plan that matches your usage. Starter is fine for most side projects.
- At checkout, check the box that says “Join the Ambassador Event — 14-day trial instead of 7”. This also signals you’re going for the 3-month reward later. If you forget, you can opt in from the dashboard afterward — same outcome.
- Build something with the API. Or don’t — even just trying it out and writing about that experience is fine.
- Write your post using the recipe above. Five minutes is plenty.
- Submit the URL in your dashboard at
/dashboard/ambassador. We review within 2–3 business days and apply the reward to your billing.
That’s the whole flow.
FAQ
Does the post need to be in English? No. English, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese — anything that’s publicly readable counts.
What if my post doesn’t get any traffic? Doesn’t matter. We don’t measure views. A casual mention on a personal blog with 5 readers is rewarded the same as a 3-sentence Reddit comment.
Can I post it on X / Twitter only? Yes — a thread or even a single tweet with our link counts.
I’m already a paying customer. Can I still join? Yes. Submit a post and we’ll either extend your billing cycle or apply a credit. Same value as a new user gets.
What if I post and never claim it? Email us anytime — we’ll honor it. There’s no expiration on submitted posts.
Do I have to keep the post up forever? No. But please keep it published for the full duration of your reward — 3 months on Starter means 3 months live. Taking it down early may pause the remaining reward. After the reward ends, you’re free to take it down whenever, though leaving it up genuinely helps us and we’d appreciate it.
Is there a limit on how many posts I can submit? No. Each one is rewarded independently. Some users have stacked 12+ months of free Starter by writing several short posts on different platforms.
What if I think you owe me more than the standard reward? Tell us. Reply to any of our emails or contact us. We’re subjective about this — if a post puts in real effort, we pay for real effort.
The 30-second sanity check
You: building/running something that ships physical products. Cost of tracking infrastructure today: $0 (because you haven’t built it) or $100+/mo (because you bought it). Cost of trying ours: $0 for 3 months. Cost of the post: 5 minutes. Risk: cancel anytime in the 14-day trial, no charge.
The math doesn’t really make sense to skip.