Text registration fees
What A2P "10DLC" registration costs, why the carriers charge it, and how it appears on your invoice.
Before your business can text customers, US and Canadian carriers require it to be registered through a program called A2P "10DLC". Registration carries its own fees, separate from your text pool. This article explains what they are and what you pay.
Why the fees exist
They are not ours. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon run the registration program to keep spam off their networks, and they charge a registry fee to verify your business and review the kind of messages you plan to send. An unregistered number can still send a text, and it will look sent in your console, but the carrier drops it before it reaches the phone.
We pass these fees through at carrier cost plus a small fee that covers running the registration for you. There is no markup beyond that, and nothing is charged until you choose to register.
What you pay
| Fee | Amount | When |
|---|---|---|
| Brand registration | $5.00 | Once, when you submit your business |
| Campaign review | $15.00 | Per review attempt |
| Monthly campaign fee | $2.00 and up | Every month while the campaign is active |
So a typical business pays $20.00 one time and $2.00 a month.
The monthly fee depends on the use case you register, because the carriers charge us different amounts for each:
| Use case | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Low volume, up to 2,000 texts a day — the default | $2.00 |
| Charity / 501(c)(3) | $3.50 |
| Emergency | $5.50 |
| Customer care (standard), and most other use cases | $10.50 |
| Agents and franchises | $30.50 |
The registration wizard shows the live price beside every option before you pick one, and quotes your exact fees before you submit anything, so you always see the number before you agree to it. These lines appear on your invoice under "Text registration".
Low volume is the default
Most small businesses send far fewer texts than the carriers' thresholds, so registration defaults to Low volume (up to 2,000 texts/day), at $2.00 a month.
If you genuinely need more throughput than that, the usual step up is Customer care (standard) at $10.50 a month, which is also what Marketing and most other use cases cost. There is no reason to start there: Low volume carries the same content latitude as the Mixed use case and delivers the same messages to the same phones, at a fifth of the price. You can move up later if your volume grows.
Registration is optional
You are never required to register. The registration steps sit behind a "Not now" option, and you can skip them entirely if you do not plan to text customers. Skipping costs nothing, and everything else about your phone service works normally. You can come back and register whenever you want to start texting.
Rejections cost another review fee
If a campaign is rejected, fixing it and resubmitting is a new $15.00 review attempt — the carriers charge per submission and there is no free retry. This is why the wizard pushes hard on getting your legal business name, message flow and sample messages right the first time. Set up text messaging lists the most common rejection reasons and the fix for each.
Brand registration is charged once when you submit, whether or not the brand is approved on the first try.
Not the same as your text pool
Registration fees have nothing to do with how many texts you send. Sending is billed from your pooled segments — 250 per seat per month, 2¢ per segment past the pool, inbound free. See How texting is billed.