Estimated read time: 12 minutes
Text messaging has the best open rate of any channel a small business can buy, and it is not close. Email gets opened maybe a quarter of the time if you are good at it. A text gets read within minutes, by nearly everyone, nearly always. That gap is why every appointment-based business, local retailer, and e-commerce store eventually gets talked into SMS.
It is also why business texting is priced the way it is. When a channel works that well, the vendors do not need to compete on a clean number. They compete on a number that looks clean on the pricing page and then acquires companions on the invoice. Base plan, plus a telecom fee, plus credits that are not messages, plus carrier pass-through charges that arrive from a registry you have never heard of.
None of this is a scam. All of it is disclosed somewhere. But if you budget $25 a month for business texting, you are going to spend meaningfully more than $25 a month, and it is worth knowing that before you send your first campaign rather than after.
Table of Contents
The Three Layers of Cost
Before comparing any two platforms, you need the vocabulary, because the pricing pages are written in it and the vocabulary is doing work.
Layer one is the subscription. This is the number on the pricing page. It buys you a seat, a dashboard, and an allotment of credits.
Layer two is credits, and credits are not messages. A credit typically covers one SMS segment, which is 160 characters of plain text. Write a 200 character message and you just spent two credits per recipient. Add an emoji and you may have flipped the whole message into a different encoding where the segment limit drops to 70 characters, which means your 200 character message is now three credits. Attach an image and you are sending MMS, which usually costs three credits or more per recipient depending on the platform.
This is the single biggest source of budget surprise in business texting. People plan around contacts and end up billed on segments.
Layer three is fees. There is usually a monthly telecom or carrier surcharge for having a textable number, and separately there are A2P 10DLC costs, which are charged by the carriers themselves and passed through to you regardless of which platform you pick. More on those below, because they are the layer most people do not know exists.
Once you can see all three layers, the platforms stop looking like they have wildly different prices and start looking like they have wildly different shapes.
SimpleTexting: The Sane Default
SimpleTexting starts around $29 a month for 500 credits, with a local number fee that brings the practical entry cost closer to $39. Overage messages run roughly five and a half cents each. Verify the current numbers at signup, because everyone in this category adjusts pricing more often than they announce it.
The structural advantage is unlimited contacts on every plan, and incoming messages that do not cost you credits. That combination changes the math more than any feature comparison will.
Here is why it matters. Most SMS platforms charge on list size, which punishes you for the thing you are supposed to be doing, which is growing a list. Under a contact-based model, a business with 4,000 subscribers who texts once a month pays more than a business with 400 subscribers who texts weekly, even though the second business is sending more messages and getting more value. That is backwards. SimpleTexting bills on what you send, which is the model that rewards collecting names and being disciplined about how often you use them.
Free incoming messages matter for a different reason. If you intend to use texting as a two-way channel, and you should, because two-way is where SMS beats email by an order of magnitude, then a platform that charges for replies is quietly taxing the best thing about the product. Conversational use is where an appointment reminder turns into a rescheduled booking instead of a no-show.
Where it falls short: the base credit allotment is small relative to the price. If you are sending real volume, you will be buying a larger plan quickly, and at high volume the per-message economics get less compelling than a raw messaging API. It is also more platform than a business sending 200 messages a month needs.
Pick it if: you are growing a list, you want two-way conversation, or you cannot predict your contact count month to month.
EZ Texting: Cheap Until It Is Not
EZ Texting’s entry plan runs about $25 a month, dropping to roughly $20 on annual billing, for up to 500 contacts and 500 credits with a local textable number. There is a telecom fee of around $5 a month on top, and credits past your allotment bill at about four cents each, which is cheaper per overage message than SimpleTexting.
So at small scale it is the better deal. Straightforwardly. If you have 300 contacts and send twice a month, EZ Texting will cost you less and do the job.
The catch is the contact cap, and the catch is steep. The next tier up jumps to around $75 a month once you pass 500 contacts. That is not a gentle slope. That is a tripling of your bill triggered by adding one subscriber, and it arrives at exactly the moment your list starts working.
This shapes behavior in ways worth thinking about honestly. A business on a contact-capped plan starts making decisions about whether to add people to the list, which is the opposite of the decision you want to be making. You end up pruning subscribers to stay under a threshold, which means you are optimizing your marketing around a vendor’s pricing tier instead of around your customers.
Where it wins: genuinely lower cost under the cap, a longer track record than most competitors, and a solid set of built-in templates and campaign tools that make it easy to get started without a marketing background.
Pick it if: your list is small and stable by nature, which describes a lot of service businesses with a fixed client roster, or you want the lowest possible cost to test whether SMS works for you at all before committing.
The Budget Tier
Textedly and a cluster of similar tools occupy the layer below the two majors. Pricing is broadly comparable to the entry tiers above, sometimes with more credits if you commit annually.
What you give up is depth. Thinner automation, fewer integrations, less sophisticated segmentation, and support that is more email ticket than phone call. What you keep is the thing that actually generates revenue: a number people can text, a keyword they can use to opt in, and the ability to send a message to everyone who did.
There is a version of this business where that is all you need. A restaurant texting a weekly special. A salon confirming appointments. A local shop announcing a sale. If your entire SMS strategy fits in one sentence, do not buy a platform built for someone whose strategy fits in a spreadsheet.
The honest test: write down the three things you plan to do with SMS in your first six months. If none of them involve behavioral triggers, multi-step automation, or syncing with a CRM, the budget tier will serve you and the savings are real.
One caution. Cheap platforms sometimes economize on 10DLC handling and deliverability monitoring, which are the two things that determine whether your messages actually arrive. A message that does not get delivered is infinitely more expensive than a five cent message that does. Before committing, ask the vendor directly how they handle 10DLC registration and what their delivery rates look like on your carrier mix.
Real Math: 2,000 Messages a Month
Abstract pricing is useless. Here is a concrete scenario.
You run a local business. You have 800 subscribers. You send two campaigns a month plus appointment reminders, totaling roughly 2,000 outbound messages. Your messages average 180 characters, which means two segments each, which means 4,000 credits.
On a contact-unlimited, send-based platform: you need a plan sized for 4,000 credits. That is well past a $29 entry tier, so you are looking at a mid tier, realistically in the $79 to $109 range depending on the plan structure, plus the number fee. Call it $90 to $120 all-in before carrier pass-throughs.
On a contact-capped platform: 800 contacts puts you above the 500 cap immediately, so you start at the $75 tier, and 4,000 credits will exceed that tier’s allotment as well. Add overages at roughly four cents and the telecom fee. Call it $90 to $130 all-in.
They converge. That is the actual finding, and it is more useful than a winner. At this volume the platforms cost roughly the same, and your decision should be made on interface, integrations, and whether your list is going to grow, not on price.
Where they diverge is at the edges. Below 500 contacts with low send volume, the capped platform is clearly cheaper. Above roughly 2,000 contacts with moderate volume, the unlimited-contact model wins decisively and keeps winning.
Now shorten your messages to 155 characters. Your 4,000 credits become 2,000. Your bill roughly halves. That is the highest-leverage optimization in business texting and it costs nothing but editing. Write shorter. Strip the emoji. Use a link shortener. A disciplined 155 character message is the difference between a $50 plan and a $109 one.
10DLC: The Registration You Cannot Skip
This is the layer most small businesses do not know about until their messages stop arriving.
A2P 10DLC is the framework US carriers use to police application-to-person messaging sent from standard 10-digit local numbers. If your business sends texts from a normal-looking local number, this applies to you, on every platform, without exception. Unregistered traffic gets filtered, throttled, or blocked outright, and the carriers are not subtle about it.
The costs are small individually and worth knowing collectively:
- Brand registration: a one-time fee, roughly $4 to $5 for a sole proprietor and higher for standard brands, with some providers charging more when secondary vetting is involved.
- Campaign registration: roughly $15 to $17 per campaign, one time.
- Monthly campaign fees: roughly $1.50 to $10 per campaign per month, ongoing.
- Carrier surcharges: roughly three tenths of a cent to half a cent per message, charged by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon and passed through to you.
- Appeal fee: around $11 if your brand registration is rejected and you want to contest it.
Multiple carriers adjusted their pass-through rates in January 2026, which is why some businesses saw their texting costs rise without changing anything about their sending.
Two practical notes. First, most platforms handle registration for you and either absorb or itemize these fees, so ask which. Second, registration takes time, sometimes days, occasionally longer if your business details do not match your registered records exactly. Start the process before you need to send, not the week of your promotion.
Toll-free numbers are an alternative with their own verification process and different throughput characteristics. Short codes are the premium option, cost hundreds a month, and are almost never right for a small business.
Compliance: The Part That Can Actually Cost You
Platform fees are a budgeting question. Compliance is a business-continuity question.
Business texting in the US falls under the TCPA, and the TCPA has statutory damages per message. Not per campaign. Per message. Send an unconsented promotional text to 2,000 people and the theoretical exposure is not a rounding error. Plaintiffs’ firms in this space are organized and they are not looking for bad actors, they are looking for sloppy ones.
The rules that matter most in practice:
Get express written consent for marketing. A checkbox they ticked, a keyword they texted, a form they filled out. Consent must be specific to text messaging. A customer giving you their phone number to confirm an appointment has not consented to receive your promotions.
Keep the records. Timestamp, method, and what exactly they agreed to. Your platform should store this. Confirm that it does before you need it.
Honor opt-outs immediately. STOP must work, always, and it must work without a human in the loop. Every credible platform handles this automatically. Never override it.
Respect quiet hours. Do not send marketing before 8am or after 9pm in the recipient’s local time zone. Note that phrase: the recipient’s. If you have subscribers across time zones and you schedule by yours, you will eventually text someone at 6am, and that is both a violation and a fast way to lose a customer.
Identify yourself. Every marketing message should make clear who is sending it and how to stop receiving them.
Do not buy lists. Purchased phone lists are the single most reliable way to end up in trouble in this channel. There is no version of this that works.
None of it is complicated. All of it needs to be actually done, and a platform that makes consent capture and record-keeping easy is worth paying a little more for.
When Texting Is the Wrong Channel
Worth saying plainly, because the open rate statistic gets quoted at people until they buy something they do not need.
Skip SMS if your purchase cycle is long and considered. Texting is an urgency channel. It is superb for “your table is ready” and “we have three left” and terrible for anything requiring deliberation. If you sell a $12,000 service with a six week evaluation, texting will annoy your prospects rather than move them.
Skip it if you have nothing time-sensitive to say. The channel’s power comes from its intrusiveness, and intrusiveness spends down goodwill. Every message you send that was not worth interrupting someone for makes the next one less effective. Businesses that send weekly because they bought a plan and feel obligated to use it are actively destroying the asset.
Skip it if your list is under a hundred people. At that size, personally texting them from your actual phone is better, cheaper, and more effective, and it is not close.
Skip it if you already have SMS bundled elsewhere. Many CRMs, booking systems, and e-commerce platforms include texting. A second tool means a second bill, a second list to keep in sync, and a second place for opt-outs to fail to propagate, which is a compliance risk. If you are still building out your customer systems, our guide to the best CRM for solopreneurs covers which options include messaging natively.
How to Choose
A decision path, in order.
Check what you already own. Booking software, CRM, e-commerce platform. If SMS is bundled and adequate, stop here and save the money.
Estimate segments, not messages. Take your realistic monthly send volume, multiply by contacts, then divide your average message length by 160 and round up. That number is what you are actually buying.
Project your contact count twelve months out. If it grows, weight heavily toward unlimited contacts. If it is structurally fixed, the capped plans are cheaper and you should take the savings.
Ask about 10DLC before you sign. Who registers, what it costs, how long it takes, and whether carrier surcharges are absorbed or itemized. A vendor who answers this crisply is a vendor who has done it many times.
Start on a monthly plan. Annual billing saves real money, but not if you discover in month three that your customers do not want to be texted. Earn the discount after you have proof.
Send fewer, shorter, better messages. This is the whole game. The businesses that make SMS work send rarely and say something worth reading. The businesses that burn it out send weekly because they are paying for a plan.
FAQ
What is the cheapest business text messaging service?
At small scale, contact-capped entry plans around $20 to $25 a month are the cheapest, plus a telecom fee of roughly $5. Once you pass a few hundred contacts, unlimited-contact platforms usually cost less overall. Add 10DLC registration and carrier surcharges to any quote you get.
What is a credit, and how many do I need?
A credit typically covers one 160-character SMS segment sent to one recipient. Longer messages, emoji, and images consume more. Estimate by multiplying recipients by segments per message, not by number of campaigns.
Do I have to register for 10DLC?
If you send business texts from a standard 10-digit US number, yes. Unregistered traffic gets filtered or blocked by carriers. Most platforms walk you through it, but the underlying registration and carrier fees are charged regardless of provider.
Can I text customers who gave me their phone number?
Not for marketing. Under the TCPA, promotional texts require express written consent specific to text messaging. A number collected for appointment confirmation or order updates does not carry over to promotions.
How often should I text my list?
Most small businesses do best at two to four times a month, and many do better at less. The channel’s value comes from being worth interrupting someone for. If your message would not survive being read out loud to a customer standing in front of you, do not send it.
Is SMS better than email?
They do different jobs. SMS wins on urgency, immediacy, and two-way conversation. Email wins on depth, cost per message, and anything that needs to be referred back to later. Most businesses that succeed with texting run both and use SMS sparingly.
What happens if I send a marketing text at 10pm?
You have likely violated quiet-hours rules, which run 8am to 9pm in the recipient’s local time zone. Schedule by recipient time zone, not yours, and confirm your platform supports that.
Related Coverage
- Best CRM for Solopreneurs: many CRMs include SMS, which may save you a separate subscription entirely.
- Notion vs Airtable: how to think clearly about tool comparisons where the pricing pages are doing the arguing.
- Best AI Writing Tools for Small Business: useful for drafting campaign copy that fits inside a single segment.
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