FBA Prep Pricing Index 2026: what verified prep centers charge.
Across the 44 verified US prep centers in our directory that publish a per-unit rate, the median entry rate is $1.30 per unit, the middle 50% runs $0.99 to $1.66, and the median best published volume rate is $0.90. Entry rates span $0.65 to $2.25; published volume floors reach $0.30 per unit at 2,000+ units.
Two things before you quote these numbers. First, "per unit" is not one product: some rates bundle polybags, dunnage, and 14 to 30 days of storage, while others cover receiving and labeling only. This index compares published headline rates, not a normalized basket. Second, this is a census of our curated directory of verified centers, not an industry-wide survey. Pricing surveys self-report; every number here traces to a published rate card we verified and dated, and the full per-center dataset is downloadable.
US per-unit prep pricing, June 2026.
$1.30
$0.99 to $1.66
$0.90
44
Pool: 44 US centers, 43 distinct rate cards. Two Billings, Montana centers (Tailwind Pack & Ship and Yellowstone Prep and Ship) publish verbatim-identical rate cards; we count that card once. Counting it twice reads $1.28. Quartiles are computed on the full pool by linear interpolation. Medians, not means: the distribution is right-skewed and small-n. 58 of 64 published centers (91%) put some form of pricing in public; that transparency rate is a property of our curated directory, not of the market.
Cheapest published entry rates: Carolina Prep & Ship at $0.65, then Number One Prep, Prep Center IN, and WestFBA at $0.75. Priciest: Prep Ninjas (Starter) and Flat Rate Prep at $2.25; Flat Rate Prep's number is the only true all-inclusive flat rate in the index (bubble wrap, boxes, and 14-day storage bundled in), so a sticker-price comparison is unfair to it. Deepest published volume floor: Esellts at $0.30 per unit at 2,000+ units.
- A fair 2026 benchmark for a low-volume quote on standard single-unit prep is about $1.30 per unit. A quote under $1.00 usually means volume tiers, fewer inclusions, or both.
- Ask what the per-unit rate includes before comparing quotes. Polybags, dunnage, and storage are inside some rates and billed separately by others.
- Volume pricing is real but gated: the published $0.30 to $0.45 floors all require at least 1,000 units, and the $0.30 floor requires 2,000 or more.
Entry rates run 58% higher in tax-free states.
Sellers shop tax-free states to avoid sales-tax nexus on inventory. The published prices say the operators know it: median entry rates in the four tax-free states with verified centers run $1.50 per unit against $0.95 everywhere else. The sales-tax saving is partly priced into the prep fee.
| Group | Centers | Entry median | Middle 50% | Best-rate median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tax-free states (NH, OR, DE, MT) | 24 | $1.50 | $1.25 to $1.75 | $1.00 |
| All other US states | 20 | $0.95 | $0.84 to $1.26 | $0.78 |
Montana
$1.25
entry median, 7 centers, cheapest tax-free cluster
Delaware
$1.50
entry median, 3 centers
Oregon
$1.70
entry median, 9 centers
New Hampshire
$1.75
entry median, 5 centers, priciest tax-free cluster
No published center in Alaska, the fifth tax-free state. The duplicated Billings rate card sits inside the Montana group; we re-ran the medians in this table without it and none moves. Confound, disclosed: this is observational. The tax-free pool skews to small, arbitrage-oriented operators and the other pool contains several high-volume budget operators (NJ, FL, IN), so this is a real pattern in published prices, not a causal estimate of what prepping in Oregon costs.
- If you prep in NH, OR, DE, or MT, expect to give back part of the sales-tax saving in the prep fee. Median entry: $1.50 versus $0.95 elsewhere.
- Montana is the cheapest tax-free cluster (median $1.25 across 7 centers); New Hampshire is the priciest ($1.75 across 5).
- Do not read this as tax-free states costing more overall. Landed cost depends on the tax saving itself and your freight into the state.
The fees the per-unit medians hide.
Per-unit rates get the attention, but the fixed costs decide what a low-volume month actually costs. From the same 44-center pool:
41%
charge a one-time onboarding fee
18 of 44 centers charge a setup, registration, or deposit fee. Median $87, range $25 to $300: Simply Ship Now charges $300, Epic Prep and Delaware Prep & Fulfillment Center $299, and Oregon Prep Center and Oregon Prep and Ship take $250 deposits.
2 of 44
require a monthly membership to use the service at all
EnZone PrepWorks ($47/month plus a $35 setup) and Dollan Prep Center ($48/month software fee, waived above 2,500 units/month). At low volume, a required membership materially raises the effective per-unit cost.
3
publish conditional low-volume fees
East Coast Prep and Ship bills $50/month under 200 units; Live Free or Die Distribution bills a monthly minimum fee under 300 units that its own site lists as both $99 and $97; Epic Prep applies a $500/month minimum invoice under 200 units/month.
4
gate intake on seller tenure
Heroic Prep requires 1 year of selling plus 1,000 units/month; Live Free or Die requires 1 year; Network Prep requires 1 year plus an Inventory Lab subscription; Stock and Ship requires 6 months plus 500 units/month.
Minimums are the norm, not the exception: 24 of the 44 pool centers publish a shipment, monthly, or eligibility floor (shipment minimums run 10 to 100 units; monthly floors run about 200 to 1,000 units), 6 explicitly advertise no minimums, and 14 publish no minimum or floor. Germany runs the inverse model: both verified German centers sell optional monthly modules that buy the per-unit rate down rather than fees that stack on top.
- Budget a median $87 (up to $300) in one-time onboarding fees; 41% of verified US centers charge one.
- Required memberships are rare (2 of 44), but conditional low-volume fees are not. Ask exactly what you pay in a 100-unit month.
- Four centers will not take you at all without selling tenure or a volume floor. If you are new, filter for the 6 that advertise no minimums.
The US tiers, the UK itemizes, Germany sells memberships.
The structures differ by country, which is why we never convert currencies or pool non-USD rates with the US statistics. GBP, EUR, and CAD figures below are reported in their own currency, itemized rather than aggregated (3, 2, and 1 centers are too few for honest medians).
Volume-tiered all-in cards
Of all 64 published centers: 39 price by volume tier, 17 use a flat per-unit or per-operation rate, 1 is all-inclusive flat, 1 is percent-of-fee, 6 are quote-based. Within the US pool, tiered cards open at a median $1.45 at entry while single flat rates sit at $1.00; the gap is partly mechanical, since a tiered card's entry tier is its low-volume price while a flat rate prices all volumes at once.
Itemized per-operation menus
None of the 3 verified UK centres publishes an all-in per-unit rate; each prices the operations separately (Prep Stations' card is plus 20% VAT; the other two do not state VAT treatment). Fast Prep UK: receiving and inspection from 0.21 GBP per unit (0.13 at 2,000+ units/month). Prep Stations: FNSKU labelling 0.27 GBP standard, 0.22 VIP, with a 9.99 or 49.99 GBP monthly account charge. Prep4FBA: receiving 0.30 plus FNSKU 0.25 GBP. Side-by-side cards live on the UK ranking.
Membership modules that buy the rate down
Both verified German centers sell optional monthly modules (0 to 250 EUR/month, prices plus VAT) where the subscription lowers the per-unit rate: Adler Prep runs 0.95 EUR with no monthly fee down to 0.60 EUR on the 250 EUR/month module (and auto-switches each customer to the cheapest tier); Rebel Prep runs 1.00 EUR down to 0.70 EUR at 249.90 EUR/month. The inverse of a US setup fee: the fixed cost is opt-in and pays for itself at volume.
Lulux Fulfillment (NY) is the only percent-of-fee model in the index: 25% of each ASIN's Amazon FBA fee per unit, with a $1.00/unit floor, a $29.99/month fee, and a $500 retainer. It is excluded from the medians because its effective rate depends on your catalog. Flat Rate Prep (WI) is the only true all-inclusive flat rate: $2.25 per unit including materials and 14-day storage that most centers bill separately. The one verified Canadian center, Niagara Prep Hub (ON), publishes a flat 0.80 per unit with no fees or minimums; its pricing page does not state the currency, which we record as CAD from the Ontario location and flag as unconfirmed.
- Never compare a US all-in rate to a UK menu line or a German module rate. Rebuild your own monthly job from each price sheet before comparing totals.
- On tiered cards, the advertised floor is not your price. Quote against the tier your real monthly volume lands in.
- Unusual models deserve arithmetic, not suspicion: a percent-of-fee or all-inclusive rate can win or lose against $1.30/unit depending entirely on your catalog.
4 of 58 centers with public pricing contradict themselves on their own sites.
Our content-level sweep of every published center on June 9 and 10, 2026read each operator's live pricing pages against their stored rate cards. Four operators' own live pages disagreed with themselves:
Homepage lists its fourth volume tier at $0.55/unit; its own /pricing/ page lists the same tier at $0.60.
Kitting is priced at $3.00 on one live page and $2.50 on another.
The monthly minimum fee for accounts under 300 units appears as $99 in one place on the site and $97 in another.
Published turnaround appears as both 24-48 hours and 24-72 hours (a service claim on pricing material, not a price).
For each of these, the index stores one number per center and footnotes the other in the dataset. None of the four is a large gap, and that is the point: rate cards drift quietly, which is why this index carries verification dates instead of asking you to trust that someone checked. How we verify and what we have excluded by name lives in the verification study.
- Before signing, ask which number goes on the invoice and get the full rate card in writing. Operators' own pages drift.
- A center that publishes its pricing and keeps it consistent is showing you its operational discipline for free.
How the numbers were built, and where they can mislead you.
Population. All 64 centers published in the FBA Prep Finder directory as of June 12, 2026 (58 US, 3 UK, 2 Germany, 1 Canada). Every one cleared our 4-point operator standard from primary sources before listing, and every one was re-checked at the content level on June 9 and 10, 2026. The 3 centers carrying a verification flag at snapshot time (Boxy Prep, Prep & Store Center, MyPrepCenter) are retained in the dataset and excluded from every statistic.
Definitions. "Entry" is the published standard single-unit prep rate at the lowest published volume tier: what a new low-volume seller faces. "Best" is the lowest published standard single-unit rate on any card or tier. Excluded from "best" by rule: labels-only cards, bundle per-item rates, and "as low as" headline claims with no tier attached. If you rebuild this index from operator homepages you will see lower headline numbers than our parsed floors ("$0.40 wholesale", "from $0.30"); we record those as claims, not rates.
The duplicate card. Tailwind Pack & Ship and Yellowstone Prep and Ship, both Billings, MT with different owners, publish verbatim-identical rate cards and terms; Yellowstone's domain is 3 years older and Tailwind appears to have copied the sheet (the relationship is unknown and both listings cross-reference the finding). Statistics on this page count that card once. The duplicated card sits in the Montana group, where deduplication changes no group median; on the US pool it moves the entry median from $1.28 to $1.30, and we publish the deduplicated number.
Sensitivity.The pool contains one approximate value (Proven Prep's operator-stated "about $1.25/unit") and one card that covers receiving plus labeling rather than all-in prep (DM Prep US). Recomputed from the dataset: the full pool reads $1.28, the deduplicated pool $1.30 (the published headline), dropping the approximate value as well reads $1.35, and the strict pool that also drops the receiving-plus-labeling card reads $1.40. Under any of these inclusion rules the honest headline range is $1.28 to $1.40 per unit.
Other recorded limitations. Tier bases differ across cards (per month for most, per shipment, per ASIN, or per shipment size), so "entry tier" mixes bases. Two entry rates describe mid-volume sellers, not beginners: Delaware Prep & Fulfillment Center ($1.96) and Heroic Prep ($1.75) both require 1,000 units/month just to onboard. Two values are our arithmetic and are flagged as computed in the dataset: Prep4FBA's 0.55 GBP (our sum of receiving plus labelling) and Rater Prep's $0.90 best rate (the published $1.00 base minus the published $0.10 volume discount). Niagara Prep Hub's currency is assumed CAD from its Ontario location and unconfirmed. Prepare Less's card has not changed since at least April 2024 and may be stale.
Selection bias, the big one. This is a census of our verified directory, not the market. We screen out 3PLs, dead sites, and fabricated operators (the verification study names them), and transparent operators are easier to verify, so the sample over-represents centers with public, honest rate cards. Read every number as "across the verified centers in the FBA Prep Finder directory," because that is what it is.
Excluded from the median pool, every one with a reason.
| Center(s) | Reason |
|---|---|
| Amazing Logistics (CA), Extra Mile Prep (GA), FBA In and Out (CA), Kaizen Prep Services (FL), Kitting & Assembly Solutions (CO) | Quote-based: no public per-unit rate to pool. |
| Central Virginia Prep (VA) | Its only published rates are a January 2022 increase notice, which we treat as historical, not current. |
| Lulux Fulfillment (NY) | Percent-of-fee model (25% of each ASIN's Amazon FBA fee). The effective rate depends on the seller's catalog, so it cannot be pooled. |
| A&M Prep Services (CA), Priority Prep (TX), Simple Price Prep (GA) | A-la-carte menus with no published all-in single-unit rate. |
| Romex Enterprise (FL) | Specialty returns and removal-order reprocessing (QC $0.29 to $0.99), not standard inbound prep. Its rates now carry a mandatory per-package handling fee of unpublished size. |
| Boxy Prep (MI), Prep & Store Center (OH), MyPrepCenter (MI) | verification_status = flagged at snapshot time (two dead sites, one outage with an unreconciled address). Retained in the dataset for completeness, excluded from every statistic. |
| All GBP, EUR, and CAD centers | Not excluded, never pooled: non-USD pricing is reported in its own currency sections below and never converted. |
This index is refreshed annually; each edition is archived permanently at its own year-stamped URL with its dataset downloadable, and the 2027 edition will add year-over-year tables for every statistic above and link back here. Download the 2026 per-center dataset (JSON, 64 records): raw stored rate strings, parsed values, parse flags, and exclusion reasons for every published center. If you find an error, email hello@fbaprepfinder.com and we re-verify against the operator's primary sources and correct the page.
FBA prep pricing questions.
How much does FBA prep cost per unit in 2026?
What do prep centers charge for FNSKU labeling?
Do FBA prep centers charge setup or monthly fees?
Why do prep centers in tax-free states charge more per unit?
Is this an industry-wide FBA prep pricing survey?
How often is the FBA Prep Pricing Index updated?
FBA prep fees and calculator
The fee taxonomy (receiving, prep, storage, returns, onboarding) plus an interactive monthly-cost calculator.
Top verified prep centers
The US ranking of centers that cleared the 4-point standard, with the data behind each pick.
The verification study
How many self-described prep centers are not pure prep, and the candidates we excluded by name.
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