Postcards · letters · prints · things small makers make · by post
A 4 × 6 card with artwork that exists for one person and gets printed exactly once. It turns up on a Tuesday, for no occasion, and ruins their composure a bit. And when a card isn’t enough: a thing someone makes by hand, for them, at a bench we know.
$5.00 for one card, printed and posted. You don’t see it before it goes: it is a surprise to you as well, which is most of the fun.
$12 a month for a desk that keeps up with your people. The cards it sends, and the ones you write yourself, are included. A gift, from a maker or a shop, is priced on its own and charged only on your yes.
Dear Mom,
Congratulations on becoming the proud parent of a living, breathing sourdough starter! Here’s to many more delicious adventures and bubbly kitchen experiments. You’ve got this kneaded down! 🍞
Love always, Me
For a mother, both sides. Brief: “my mom finally kept a sourdough starter alive for a whole month.” The back is printed exactly as it was written, pun included. We had no say in the pun.
Each of those was made once, from that sentence, by the same pipeline your card goes through — no retouching, no picking the best of ten. Ask it the potato’s sentence again and you get something else entirely (this week: a penguin with a megaphone), which is the point: it doesn’t make the same card twice. In fairness, we left one out. Asked for a three-legged greyhound, it drew four legs.
Maya — word is the trails have you back, which finally explains why you never pick up.
No reply needed, no news here.
— Ian
No. 01 — Postcard. Artwork on one side, words on the other, and no envelope, so the postman reads it too. That’s the deal with postcards.
Ian · Portland OR
Dad — you said on Sunday that you didn’t need anything, which I’ve chosen to read as a dare.
No parcel, then. Just the rest of the story about the fence, in writing, where you can’t interrupt it…
No. 02 — Printed letter. One sheet, folded in three, in an envelope. For when a postcard is too public and the thing you’ve got to say runs long.
No. 03 — A print, made for them. An original drawn for one person, printed large on fine-art paper, framed if you like, where it will still be three years after you’ve forgotten sending it.
The year of the starterFor Mom · 20 pagesNo. 04 — A book. Twenty illustrated pages about one person and one year of their life. Their name on the cover.
for Frank
his old CB350, inked from the photo his daughter sent · signed on the back
Made by hand · one of oneNo. 05 — From a maker. A small studio we’ve invited makes it by hand, for this one person. They see a first name and what to make, never your money, and the address only once they’ve said yes.
A hand-thrown plate with an octopus on it, from a potter in Maine
Why: she’s been learning to cook octopus all winter, and says so every time.
No. 06 — A found gift. Something that already exists, in a small shop, that fits one fact about them better than anything new could.
No. 07 — Handwritten note. Real pen, real pressure, real paper. The press for it is built and not switched on, so this drawer stays shut. It is listed because it is coming, not because you can have it.
Every morning it reads the people you’ve added — what’s coming up, how long it’s been, whatever you’ve told it lately — and decides whether anyone is due. Most days nobody is, and it says so.
The cards, emailed notes and letters it sends are included, and so are the cards you write yourself, up to eight a month. A maker’s piece, a found gift, the print and the book are gifts: it proposes, you approve, and only then are you charged — the standing order does not quietly include a $95 frame. Handwritten notes aren’t open yet.
Someone thought of you and we did the posting. If it reached you by email, the link at the bottom opens a page that’s yours: say what you’d welcome, how often, or nothing at all. It takes a minute and you don’t need an account. If it came on paper, that’s the whole of it — enjoy it. What this is.
| One postcard, no account | $5.00 |
|---|---|
| The standing order, per month | $12.00 |
| Cards, emailed notes and letters it sends | included |
| Cards you write yourself, up to 8 a month | included |
| A piece from a maker | their price, all of it to them |
| A found gift | the listing price |
| A print made for them | $35.00 |
| The same, framed | $95.00 |
| A 20-page book | $39.00 |
| Handwritten note | not open |
The standing order buys the attention: someone keeping up with your people, drafting the thing, and asking before anything is bought. Gifts are charged only once you say yes. Your first single postcard is half off with FIRSTPURCHASE.
The desk is in rehearsal. Every morning it reads your people, decides, drafts and proposes gifts for real, and you see all of it; what it sends goes to our own inbox instead of to them. We switch it on, not you, once its judgement holds up. The cards you send yourself go out as normal.
A shopping assistant can order a made-for-them postcard here, with a sentence about the person instead of a design. Whichever way it comes in, the recipient’s own rules are checked on our side before anything is made. If it asks first, it gets a one-time delivery token, good for a week, and the address goes on the label at our end — never handed back.
| Postcard | $6.00 |
|---|---|
| Printed letter | $1.80 |
| A print made for them | from $54.00 |
| Book, 20pp | $56.40 |
Shipping included. Published openly and machine-readable (llms.txt), same price for every assistant. A channel with secret rates isn’t a channel, it’s a market.
Send them a postcard for $5. Or keep a desk for $12 a month and something keeps up with them for you, cards included.
Colophon: messages are written by a language model (OpenAI’s GPT-4o) from what you tell us, and the artwork is generated for one named person by Google’s Gemini image model. The desk’s judgement — who, when, whether at all — is Anthropic’s Claude. Postcards and letters are printed and posted by Stannp in the United States; prints and books by Prodigi. That disclosure lives down here rather than on the tin, because what you are buying is a card, not a model.