Franchise text messaging: separate logins, shared credits
Every location gets its own account: its own number, its own contacts, its own inbox. What they share is a pool of credits, so the whole group’s volume counts as one number when we price it. And nobody needs corporate’s permission to set it up.
Every franchise texting page says the same three things
Texts get opened. Corporate keeps control of the brand. Each location gets a local number. All true, all on every competitor’s page, and none of it helps you decide anything.
Here is what those pages don’t contain: a price. We read eight of them. Not one publishes a rate on the franchise page. Which is odd, because when you multiply anything by forty locations, the rate is the entire decision.
So this page is mostly numbers. Ours are below, including the ones where we look expensive.
One competitor’s own buying guide tells franchises to ask whether a platform can “route cost so the brand funds its own campaigns and each franchisee funds theirs.” Good question. We checked every vendor page ranking for this term. None of them answer it. Ours is here.
A credit is a segment, and a segment is smaller than you think
One credit sends one SMS segment. A segment is 160 characters, but only while your message is plain GSM text. Put a single emoji anywhere in it and the whole message re-encodes, and a segment drops to 70 characters.
Forty locations, 5,000 contacts each. One brand-wide promo goes out to all 200,000 people. The copy is 160 characters and someone drops a 🎉 into it at the last minute.
Same message. Same audience. One character of difference. This is the sort of thing that’s invisible on a platform that won’t show you a rate.
Separate plans quietly throw away a third of what you buy
Our credits don’t roll over. We’d rather put that on the page than let you discover it in month two. Whatever a location doesn’t send by the end of the billing period is gone.
For one business that’s a minor annoyance. Across a location network it’s the biggest line of waste in the whole bill, because location volume is never even. The busy store runs out and buys overage at 5¢. The slow store pays full price for credits it never sends. Both things happen in the same month, on the same brand, and separate plans can’t see each other.
Every location on the 2,000-credit annual plan at $58/month. Collectively they actually send about 32,500 segments — roughly two-thirds utilization. That is generous for a location network.
That’s a 54% premium over their own list rate, paid for nothing at all, and 210,000 credits a year expiring unsent.
One pool fixes this without anyone changing how they text. The quiet location’s unused credits get spent by the busy one, because there is only one balance. You buy what the group sends, not what you guessed each location might send.
Volume pricing starts at 300,000 segments a month. No single location will ever get there.
Our volume rate card opens at 300,000 segments per month. A busy single location might send 10,000. On its own it will never see these rates.
Pooled volume counts as one number. Thirty locations sending 10,000 each is 300,000 segments, priced exactly like one account sending 300,000. Apart, those same thirty locations pay retail.
| Monthly volume | Per segment |
|---|---|
| 300K – 1M | $0.0065 |
| 1M – 2.5M | $0.0057 |
| 2.5M – 5M | $0.0050 |
| 5M+ | $0.0046 |
| Monthly volume | Per segment |
|---|---|
| 300K – 1M | $0.0120 |
| 1M – 2.5M | $0.0110 |
| 2.5M – 5M | $0.0100 |
| 5M+ | $0.0088 |
Each rate applies only to the messages inside that band. Crossing a threshold doesn’t reprice everything below it. It prices the messages above it at the lower rate. At 1,500,000 segments: the first 1M at $0.0065, the next 500K at $0.0057, for $9,350 — a blended $0.00623 per message.
MMS is billed at 3× the outbound band rate; inbound MMS at 2×. Carrier pass-through applies on top. The carrier table is below.
Same 2,000 segments a month per location either way. The only thing that changes is whether they buy as 150 accounts or as one.
Carrier fees are billed at cost with no markup and vary with your customers’ carrier mix — $0.0035 to $0.0050 outbound depending on the network. We’ve used a blended $0.0040 here. Your real number depends on who your customers are with, and we’ll show you the carrier table rather than average it away.
Toll-free numbers cost franchise locations about 3.5× more
Two things about toll-free that rarely make it onto a pricing page. It bills both directions: every inbound reply consumes a credit. And the outbound rate is roughly double 10DLC at the same volume.
For a broadcast-only list that’s survivable. For franchise locations — which do have actual conversations, because customers reply to a text from the store down the road — it compounds fast.
Across a location network having tens of thousands of two-way conversations a month, that gap is most of a headcount.
Toll-free still earns its place when you need throughput without brand registration, or you’re sending into Canada at volume. It just shouldn’t be anyone’s default, and on most platforms it quietly is.
Nobody has to be anybody’s parent company
Most platforms support exactly one arrangement: corporate buys credits in bulk and allocates them down to child accounts. Useful if your franchisor wants to fund messaging. Useless if it doesn’t, or if it’s slow, or if you’re six owners who’d rather not wait for a brand-wide decision.
Anyone can buy the pool here. All three of these work:
Franchisor funds messaging as a brand benefit and every location draws from one balance. Standard top-down setup, and the only model most platforms support.
A group of independently owned locations pools volume with no franchisor involved. Nobody needs corporate’s permission, and nobody needs to be anyone’s parent company.
Corporate funds brand campaigns from its own pool; locations fund their own local sends. Two pools, one rate, and a clean line between whose budget paid for what.
However it’s funded, the volume still counts as one number for pricing. And how strictly a location is held to its share — hard caps, threshold alerts, or a completely open balance — is a setup decision, not a product limitation. Tell us how much the group trusts each other and we’ll configure it that way.
Shared money, separate everything else
Pooling credits is a billing arrangement. It is not a merge. Each location runs as its own organization with its own login, its own number, its own contact list and its own inbox — the way it would if it had signed up alone.
Multi-unit owners and area managers can hold access across the locations they’re responsible for without those lists bleeding together. A customer who joined the Fenton list is on the Fenton list, not the brand’s.
Locations close and change hands. Decide up front, in writing, who owns a location’s contact list when it leaves the group, what happens to its share of a prepaid pool, and who keeps the number. Separate organizations make that easy to answer cleanly. Put the answer in your group agreement anyway. Ask every vendor you’re evaluating the same question.
Registration is where multi-location rollouts actually stall
Every business texting on a US local number has to be registered with the carriers. That is A2P 10DLC. Enforcement arrived in stages: throttling from July 2023, blocking from that August, and by February 2025 the major carriers were rejecting effectively all unregistered traffic. No warning, no degraded delivery. It simply doesn’t arrive.
With us that’s a $19 one-time carrier fee and two to three business days. It’s a carrier charge, not ours, and we don’t mark it up.
A franchise system isn’t one company for registration purposes. Independently owned locations are usually separate legal entities with their own EINs, and how a group registers depends on whether your locations text as themselves or as the brand.
The Campaign Registry has a campaign type for exactly this case, called Franchise, and it requires disclosure of every subentity in the system. So the structure has to be settled before anyone submits anything: a corporate-owned network and forty independent owners under one trademark are not the same filing, and getting it wrong means resubmitting and waiting again. Tell us how your system is actually owned and we’ll map it first. Our A2P 10DLC guide walks through the rest.
One more thing worth knowing: consent doesn’t travel between locations on its own. Someone who joined the list at one store didn’t agree to hear from the other thirty-nine. Separate organizations keep that boundary intact by default, which is the safe side of the line to be on.
What locations actually send
The pooling argument is the same everywhere. What changes is the traffic underneath it, and whether your volume is spiky. That is what decides how much a shared balance is worth to you.
Local LTOs and slow-Tuesday offers that don’t collide with the brand calendar. Volume spikes hard around promos, which is exactly when a shared balance pays for itself.
See the restaurants & pizzerias pageClass changes, win-backs and renewal nudges. January is four times December. A plan big enough for January means overbuying for the other eleven.
See the gyms & fitness studios pageOn-my-way texts and arrival windows, sent per territory. Steady weekday volume with weather-driven reschedules that arrive all at once.
See the home services pageReady-for-pickup alerts and service-due reminders. Heavily two-way, which is the case where the toll-free premium hurts most.
See the auto shops & dealers pageFilling a chair that opened an hour ago. Hyper-local, low volume per location, and completely pointless to run as forty separate contracts.
See the salons & spas pageCheck-in details and guest requests. Seasonal by property, so a coastal location and a city one balance each other out inside one pool.
See the hotels & lodging pageThe same toolset, wired for forty locations
Every plan includes all of it — there is no franchise tier and nothing here is an upsell. What changes at scale is how the pieces are arranged.
Every location logs into its own account
Each location gets its own organization with its own number, contact list and inbox. A multi-unit owner can hold access across the ones they actually own, without those lists mixing together.
More on organizationsCorporate writes it once, every location sends it right
Build the message at brand level and let locations drop it into their own sends. Local teams stop improvising the wording, and you stop finding out how they worded it after the fact.
More on templatesEach location grows its own list
Give every location its own text-to-join keyword for receipts, signage and window decals. People who join at one store land on that store’s list, not on the brand’s.
More on keywordsSend to one location’s list, or to all of them
A single location can text its own customers, and corporate can reach every list at once. Each person receives an individual message rather than a group thread with four thousand strangers in it.
More on mass textingCustomers reply to the store, not to head office
Replies land in that location’s inbox, where someone who knows the answer is already sitting. On 10DLC those inbound messages cost nothing, which is most of the reason local numbers beat toll-free for a location network.
More on 2-way messagingSee which locations actually get clicks
Shortened links report per contact, so you can run the same brand campaign across forty locations and tell whether the message failed or one market simply ignored it.
More on link trackingFour things here that aren’t on the other pages
The rate card is on this page. Not “contact sales” — the actual numbers, including the ones that make us look expensive at low volume.
Each location gets its own organization, not a sub-account with corporate reading over its shoulder. Contacts, conversations and opt-outs stay put.
Independent owners can pool without a franchisor above them. Most platforms only support corporate-buys-and-allocates.
On volume pricing, carrier pass-through is billed at cost with no markup. We show you the carrier table so you can check our math.
Send us your quote and we’ll tell you if we can beat it
Send the actual invoice or quote — not a number from memory — and we’ll go through it line by line against the rate card above. If we can beat it, we will. If we can’t, we’ll say so instead of wasting a week of your time.
Bring the whole bill: carrier fees, per-user charges, registration costs, anything billed as a platform fee. A per-message rate is easy to make look good by moving the money somewhere else, and comparing rate to rate is how location networks end up overpaying for years.
Franchise texting, frequently asked
Can locations pool credits without corporate being involved?
Yes. Anyone can buy the pool. A group of independently owned locations can pool volume together with no franchisor above them and no parent company relationship — you do not need corporate’s permission or participation.
This is the part most platforms get wrong. The usual model is corporate buys credits in bulk and allocates them down to child accounts, which is fine if your franchisor wants to fund messaging, and useless if it doesn’t.
Does pooled volume count toward the volume rate card?
Yes. Combined volume across every organization in the pool is what determines your band. Thirty locations sending 10,000 segments each is 300,000 segments — the same band as one account sending 300,000, at the same rate.
No single location is ever going to send 300,000 segments a month. A group of them will.
What happens if one location sends far more than its share?
That depends on how you set it up. Caps per organization, alerts at a threshold, or a straight shared balance with no limits are all workable — it comes down to how much you trust the group and how you’ve agreed to split the bill. Tell us how you want it to behave and we’ll configure it.
Why don’t credits roll over?
They don’t, and we’d rather say so on the page than let you find out in month two. Unused credits expire at the end of the billing period.
For a single location that’s a minor annoyance. Across forty locations buying separate plans it is the single largest source of waste in the bill, which is exactly the problem pooling solves — one balance means a quiet location’s unused credits get spent by a busy one instead of expiring.
Should our locations use 10DLC or toll-free numbers?
For most franchise systems, 10DLC. Inbound messages are free on 10DLC and billed on toll-free, and the outbound rate is roughly half. If your locations have real two-way conversations with customers — and franchise locations usually do — toll-free costs about three and a half times as much for the same exchange.
Toll-free earns its price when you need higher throughput without brand registration, or you’re sending to Canada at volume. It is not the default we’d recommend for a location network.
What counts as one credit?
One credit is one SMS segment. A segment is 160 characters, but only if the message is plain GSM text. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, and a segment becomes 70 characters.
So a 160-character message costs one credit. The same message with one emoji in it costs three. MMS is three credits. It catches people constantly.
Can one person manage several locations?
Yes. Multi-unit owners and area managers can hold access across the organizations they’re responsible for, without those locations’ contacts and conversations bleeding into each other. Each organization keeps its own list, its own number and its own opt-out record.
Do we have to sign a contract?
No. Plans can be upgraded, downgraded or paused at any time. Volume pricing above 300,000 segments a month runs on a service agreement, which is the point at which it’s worth a conversation anyway.
We’re already paying someone else. Will you beat it?
Send us what you’re paying — the actual invoice or quote, not a number from memory — and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can beat it. Sometimes we can’t, and we say so.
Bring the whole bill, including carrier fees, per-user charges and anything billed as a platform fee. Per-message rates are easy to make look good by moving the cost somewhere else.
Tell us how many locations and how much they send
We’ll work out which band the group lands in, what the carrier mix does to it, and whether pooling is actually worth it for you. Sometimes it isn’t. Under about ten locations you’re usually better off on straight plans, and we’ll tell you that too.