Most SMS pricing pages tell you a plan costs $29 a month and stop there. That number is close to meaningless on its own, because it does not tell you how many messages you get, what happens when you exceed them, what a message even counts as, or which fees arrive separately.
This guide covers what SMS marketing actually costs in 2026, using our own published rates as the worked example. Every number here is on our pricing page or our rate card, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
The unit everyone gets wrong
SMS is not billed per message. It is billed per segment, and a segment is smaller than a message.
A segment holds 160 characters of plain GSM text. Write 200 characters and you have sent two segments and paid twice. That part most people know.
The part that catches people is encoding. Put a single emoji anywhere in the message and the whole thing re-encodes to a character set where a segment holds 70 characters, not 160. A 160-character message costs one credit. The same message with one 🎉 in it costs three.
MMS — anything with an image, GIF or video — is billed at three credits regardless of length.
So before comparing anyone’s per-message rate, work out what your actual messages cost. A platform charging less per segment can cost more per campaign if your copy runs long.
What the plans actually cost
Our plans run from 100 to 25,000 credits a month. As reference points: 500 credits is $29 a month, and 2,000 credits is $58 a month on annual billing, which works out at just under three cents a segment. Paying annually gets you two months free against the monthly rate.
Every plan includes every feature. There is no tier where two-way messaging or scheduling is withheld to push you upward, and contacts and inbound messages are unlimited on all of them.
Three costs sit outside the plan:
- $19 one-time for A2P 10DLC carrier registration. This is a carrier fee, not ours, and we pass it through without markup. See our A2P registration guide.
- $10 per month per extra team member, if more than one person needs their own login.
- 5¢ per credit for anything sent beyond your monthly bundle.
There is also a $5 a month pause, which keeps your number and carrier registration alive through a slow season without paying for a full plan. Seasonal businesses lose their number on plenty of platforms by cancelling; this avoids that.
Credits do not roll over
Ours expire at the end of the billing period, and most competitors work the same way. It is the single most under-discussed line in SMS pricing, because it changes your effective rate.
Buy 2,000 credits at $58 and send 1,300 of them, and you did not pay 2.9 cents a segment. You paid 4.5 cents. Under-buying and paying 5¢ overage is usually cheaper than over-buying and watching credits expire, which is the opposite of what most people assume when picking a plan.
Where volume pricing starts
Above 25,000 credits a month, pricing moves off the plan ladder and onto a rate card. Ours opens at 300,000 segments a month:
| Monthly volume | 10DLC, per segment | Toll-free, per segment |
|---|---|---|
| 300K – 1M | $0.0065 | $0.0120 |
| 1M – 2.5M | $0.0057 | $0.0110 |
| 2.5M – 5M | $0.0050 | $0.0100 |
| 5M+ | $0.0046 | $0.0088 |
Those bands are cumulative, not retroactive. Crossing a threshold does not reprice everything underneath it; it prices the messages above it at the lower rate. At 1,500,000 segments you pay the first million at $0.0065 and the next 500,000 at $0.0057, for $9,350 — a blended $0.00623 a message.
Ask any vendor quoting you volume pricing whether their bands work this way. Some quote the headline rate as though it applies to your whole volume, and the difference is substantial.
Local numbers versus toll-free
The table above hides a bigger gap than it looks. On 10DLC local numbers, only outbound messages are billed and inbound is free. On toll-free, both directions are billed.
So a single exchange — you send one, they reply once — costs $0.0065 on 10DLC and $0.0240 on toll-free at the same volume band. Nearly four times as much for the same conversation.
If you only broadcast, the gap is roughly double. If your customers actually reply, it compounds. Toll-free earns its place when you need high throughput without brand registration, or you are sending into Canada at volume, but it is a poor default.
Carrier fees, and who marks them up
Carriers charge their own per-segment fee on top of whatever your platform charges. These are set by the networks, not by your vendor:
| Carrier | Outbound SMS | Inbound SMS |
|---|---|---|
| AT&T | $0.0035 | $0.0035 |
| T-Mobile | $0.0045 | $0.0025 |
| Verizon | $0.0040 | — |
| U.S. Cellular | $0.0050 | — |
| All others | $0.0035 | — |
Two things worth knowing. First, on our plans these are already absorbed into the plan price; on volume contracts they are passed through at cost with no markup, which is why we publish the table rather than fold it into an average. Second, plenty of platforms do mark them up, and it is invisible unless you ask directly.
Your real blended carrier cost depends on your customers’ carrier mix, which nobody can quote you precisely in advance. Anyone who gives you an exact figure before seeing your list is guessing.
How to compare two quotes honestly
Per-message rate is the easiest number to make look good, because the cost can be moved somewhere else. When you have two quotes side by side, get all of this before deciding:
- What counts as one message? Segment or message, and what happens with emoji.
- Are carrier fees included or added? If added, at cost or with margin?
- Do unused credits roll over? If not, price against what you actually send, not what you buy.
- What does inbound cost? Free on 10DLC here; billed on toll-free and on some platforms regardless.
- Are there per-user fees? Per-seat pricing changes the maths as your team grows.
- Is registration billed separately? And is it marked up?
- Are all features on all plans, or does the quoted tier withhold the one you need?
- What is the overage rate, and how does it compare with moving up a plan?
Work out the cost of one real campaign under both quotes: your actual copy, your actual list, your actual reply rate. That number tells you more than any rate card comparison, including this one.
What we would tell you not to buy
If you send fewer than a few hundred messages a month, most paid plans are poor value and you would be better on the smallest tier available anywhere, including ours. If you send under about ten thousand a month, volume pricing is not worth the conversation and plan pricing will beat it. And if you are a nonprofit, ask about the 30% discount before comparing anything, because it changes the answer.