The Kakobuy US tax-free routes notice, read in October of the following year

The notice answered a wave of questions from US buyers about tariffs, in three points. First, Kakobuy would provide "tax-free routes": parcels on them would not incur additional tariff issues or clearance work for the buyer. Second, routes outside the exemption require users to clear customs and handle taxes themselves. Third, tax-free routes would cost slightly more than conventional routes such as USPS, by approximately $5 to $10 per package, with other shipping costs largely unchanged.

The first point ends with a sentence that turns out to matter most: "We will update the tax-free route information in the near future."

On 10 October 2026 the home page ticker showed this notice as its headline, above the festival banners of that week. In the announcement list it appears as "04-17 19:36:56", with no year. A first-time visitor in autumn 2026 sees a tariff notice that looks recent and is in fact eighteen months old.

The notice has no end date and no withdrawal clause, so it never formally expires. Its follow-up, the promised update on route information, does not appear in the list as a separate notice. Maybe the information was updated directly in the shipping estimator; maybe it never was. The list cannot tell you, and that is the problem with open-ended notices: their status depends on things published somewhere else, or nowhere.

We ran the operator's estimator for a 1,000 g ordinary-goods parcel to the US on 10 October 2026. The 2025 notice compared "tax-free routes" with "conventional routes such as USPS". The list that day no longer fits that split: the USPS line itself was labelled "USPS Special Line (Duty Free Route)" at $42 for 7 to 13 days, next to "US Tax-Free (Actual Weight)" at $43.33 for 8 to 15 days. A "USPS Tax-Free Line (Battery Accepted)" quoted $39.28, and the cheapest line, a cosmetics air express service, quoted $38.07 for 11 to 17 days.

So the five-to-ten-dollar premium in the notice cannot be checked against today's list, because nearly every US line now carries a tax-free or duty-free label. The useful reading is simpler: on the day you ship, use the line description in the estimator, not the 2025 notice, to decide who clears customs. Prices move daily; treat these as one dated sample.

In our calendar this notice is an open line: it starts on 17 April 2025 and runs, dashed, to the last day we checked. Its status reads "no end date", with the age in days. It is not wrong, and we do not mark it as expired, because nothing in it ends. We mark it as stale in a narrower sense: its own promise of an update is unkept as far as the list shows, and the line names it describes have changed since.

If Kakobuy publishes a new US notice, this card will point to it and the dashed line will end on the new notice's date. Until then the rule for US buyers is: the estimator on the day of submission is the current terms; the April 2025 notice is background.