On Ready, the fixed 10DLC cost is $25 a month for registration and $2 a month per phone number, so one brand with one campaign and one number comes to $27 a month with no setup fee. Every segment you send or receive then costs $0.0075/segment on the Standard rate, plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment, itemized as its own line.
The rest of this post covers what each of those lines pays for, which charges recur, the one optional one-time charge, and a full monthly bill worked out line by line. If you run a platform that texts on behalf of its own customers, the per-sub-account math near the end matters most, because every fixed fee repeats for each customer you register.
The 10DLC cost lines on one page
Here is every charge that can appear on a Ready bill for a registered texting account. The first three are fixed. The rest scale with volume or are optional.
| Line | Price | How often | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand registration | $10 | Monthly | Ready's registration fee |
| Campaign registration | $20 | Monthly, per campaign | Ready's registration fee |
| Phone number | $2 | Monthly, per number | Every number sits on your registered campaign |
| Standard messaging rate | $0.0075/segment | Per segment, sent or received | One flat rate |
| Carrier fee | $0.0045 | Per segment | Itemized separately |
| Brand vetting (optional) | $79 Standard / $179 Enhanced | One-time | Raises trust score |
| TCPA and DNC scrubbing (optional) | $0.003 | Per segment, when switched on | Off by default |
| Landline validation (optional) | $0.003 | Per segment, when switched on | Off by default |
| Local presence (optional) | $0.0015 | For each segment of a delivered text | Off unless you turn it on; free for accounts made before November 16, 2026 |
Two words matter in that table. "Monthly" means the charge repeats while the registration is live. "Per segment" means it scales with what you send and receive, and a segment is not the same thing as a message. The per-message section below covers that.
One-time vs monthly: what you pay once and what recurs
Registration on Ready has no setup fee. When you submit, the first charge is $25, which is simply the first month of the brand fee and the campaign fee together. After that, the same $25 recurs each month, plus $2 for each number on the account.
The only true one-time charge in the whole stack is brand vetting, and it's optional. Most senders never buy it.
Everything else is usage. If you send nothing in a month, you still pay the fixed registration and number fees, but no per-segment charges.
Quick reference:
- One-time, optional: brand vetting at $79 (Standard) or $179 (Enhanced)
- Monthly, fixed: $25 for registration, $2 per number
- Per segment, always: $0.0075/segment Standard rate, plus the carrier fee
- Per segment, only if switched on: $0.003 for scrubbing, $0.003 for landline validation
- Local presence: $0.0015 for each segment of a delivered text, only if you turn it on
Brand, campaign and number fees
The brand fee: $10 a month
The brand is the registered identity of the business doing the texting: legal name, tax ID, address and website. Carriers use it to decide who is responsible for the traffic. On Ready, brand registration is done in-app and billed as a $10 monthly registration fee. One brand covers one business, however many campaigns and numbers sit under it.
If you need the background on why carriers ask for this at all, our complete guide to what 10DLC is covers the structure.
The campaign fee: $20 a month per campaign
A campaign is a registered use case: what you send, to whom, and how they opted in. You submit sample messages and your opt-in flow, carriers review it, and most approvals take 2 to 7 days.
The fee is per campaign, so the number of campaigns you register is the lever that moves this line. One business sending appointment reminders and promotions from the same use case needs one. A business that wants its transactional texts kept apart from its promotions registers a second campaign, which adds $20 a month. Don't add campaigns you don't need, but don't cram mismatched traffic under one use case to save $20 either, since a mismatch is a common cause of filtering.
The number fee: $2 a month per number
Each phone number costs $2 a month, and every number sits on the account's registered campaign. Local presence (sending from the number closest to the contact's area code) is the usual reason to hold several. It picks among registered numbers and doesn't bypass registration, so each extra number is another $2.
What this means for platforms with many sub-accounts
If you build software that texts for your own customers, each customer gets a sub-account with its own numbers and its own registration. That means the fixed stack repeats per customer:
- 1 sub-account: one brand, one campaign and one number
- 100 sub-accounts: those fixed registration and number fees repeat 100 times a month before any customer sends a text
That's a real cost of goods line, and it should be priced into your plans rather than eaten. We wrote a separate breakdown on how SaaS platforms should price 10DLC into every plan. Registration status for each sub-account is readable through the API (GET /v1/registration), and the quickstart guide walks through the setup.
The per-message line: Standard rate plus the carrier fee
Every segment, sent or received, is billed at $0.0075/segment on the Standard rate. There is one rate and it doesn't change with volume. Enterprise pricing is custom, so if you're at that scale, talk to us.
The carrier fee is a separate line. It is $0.0045 per segment, itemized on its own so you can see exactly what goes to carriers. Many providers fold this into a single per-message price, which is why comparing quotes gets confusing; our post on the carrier fee line item unpacks it.
So the all-in per-segment price is $0.0075 plus $0.0045. That figure excludes the compliance surcharge: scrubbing and landline validation each add $0.003 per segment if you switch them on for an account, and both are off by default.
Replies count too. An inbound reply is billed exactly like a sent text, at the Standard rate plus the pass-through.
Segments, not messages
This is where bills surprise people. Carriers meter segments:
- A plain-text (GSM-7) SMS fits 160 characters in one segment. Longer messages split into segments of 153 characters each.
- One emoji or other non-GSM character drops the limit to 70 characters, or 67 per segment once it splits.
- Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain ones before sending, so on Ready those never change the count. Emoji still do.
Example: a 175-character promo with one emoji is 3 unicode segments. Sent to 5,000 opted-in contacts, that's 15,000 segments. The Standard rate on those is 15,000 × $0.0075 = $113. The pass-through adds 15,000 × $0.0045 on top. Strip the emoji and trim to 160 characters, and it's 5,000 segments: $38 at the Standard rate, a third of the cost.
Where per-segment price is lower elsewhere
Honest note: if per-segment price is the only number you're optimizing, a raw CPaaS such as Twilio (around $0.0083/segment) or LeadConnector inside GoHighLevel (around $0.0083 a message, roughly $0.0128 all-in) costs less per message. What our rate pays for is everything around the send: registration handled in-app, automatic STOP handling that propagates across sends, quiet-hours holds based on the recipient's area, optional litigator and DNC scrubbing, sub-accounts, and a platform with an Inbox and automations. Opt-outs, numbers on your Ban list and known landlines are refused up front and not charged. Whether that's worth the difference depends on how much of it you'd otherwise build yourself.
Worked example: one month, every line
Assumptions for this example (not a real customer): one business, one brand, one campaign for customer care, two numbers so it can use local presence across two area codes. In a month it sends 3,000 single-segment texts and 500 two-segment texts, and receives 1,000 segments of replies. Scrubbing is on, landline validation and local presence are off.
Segment count
- Outbound: 3,000 × 1 + 500 × 2 = 4,000 segments
- Inbound: 1,000 segments
- Total billed segments: 5,000
Fixed monthly fees
- Brand: $10
- Campaign: $20
- Numbers: 2 × $2 = $4
- Fixed subtotal: $29
Usage
- Standard rate: 5,000 × $0.0075 = $38
- Scrubbing surcharge on the 4,000 sent segments: 4,000 × $0.003 = $12
Pass-through
The carrier fee for the month is 5,000 × $0.0045, shown as its own itemized line.
Total: $29 + $38 + $12 = $79, plus 5,000 × $0.0045 in pass-through.
Two things are worth noticing. First, the fixed fees are a big share of the bill here; at lower volume they dominate, at higher volume the per-segment lines take over. Second, if half of those 500 two-segment texts were trimmed to one segment, the account would save 250 segments, which is 250 × $0.0075 = $1.88 at the Standard rate plus the matching pass-through. Small per send, but it compounds across sub-accounts.
What brand vetting adds, and when to skip it
Brand vetting is an optional external review of your brand: $79 for Standard or $179 for Enhanced, paid once. It raises your trust score, and the trust score is what T-Mobile uses to set a daily cap per brand. The tiers run roughly ~2,000, ~10,000, ~40,000, ~100,000 and ~200,000 messages a day, lowest score first. AT&T throttles per second and per minute rather than with a hard daily cap.
What vetting does not do:
- It doesn't change the per-second rate. A fresh standard campaign without vetting runs around 1 to 4 segments per second; higher use-case tiers sit in the tens (roughly 10 to 75).
- It doesn't move your daily cap unless the new score crosses into a higher tier.
- It doesn't change anything on the monthly bill. Registration fees and number fees stay the same.
Worked example, at an assumed cap of ~2,000 messages a day: a 10,000-message send to T-Mobile subscribers takes about five days to drain. If vetting lifts the brand to the ~10,000 tier, it goes out in one day. If you send a few hundred texts a day, the cap never bites and $79 buys you nothing. Our post on whether brand vetting is worth $79 runs the break-even in more detail.
What you pay before and during registration
You don't have to wait for approval to start. A few details shape what that costs:
- The first 20 texts are free, and they are one-to-one sends. A campaign send is paid from the first text.
- Free texts end the moment a registration is paid for. Use them to test before you register, not after.
- Up to 500 texts a month before registering, at the normal per-text rate. After that the account has to register.
- If you bought a number before registering, it sends on Ready's shared registration at the same per-text rate while your own registration is in review.
- To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it. Billing is prepaid credits via Stripe.
Timing matters for planning: most approvals take 2 to 7 days, so start the registration before the week you need full volume. Our breakdown of how long 10DLC approval takes goes step by step.
The practical takeaway
The fixed part of 10DLC is small and predictable: $25 for registration, $2 per number, monthly, with no setup fee. The variable part is where money moves, and it's driven by segment count, not message count. Keep templates under 160 plain characters where you can, register only the campaigns your traffic needs, and buy vetting only when a daily cap actually slows you down.
If you want to see these lines on a real bill, the pricing page shows the per-segment rate, and you can sign up and send your first 20 one-to-one texts before you register.
Frequently asked questions
How much does 10DLC registration cost per month?
On Ready, one brand, one campaign and one number cost $27 a month. That breaks down to a $10 brand fee, a $20 campaign fee and $2 for the number. Each extra campaign adds $20 and each extra number adds $2.
Is there a one-time setup fee for 10DLC?
No, Ready charges no setup fee for registration. The charge at submit is $25, which is the first month of the brand and campaign fees. The only one-time charge is optional brand vetting at $79 (Standard) or $179 (Enhanced).
How much does it cost to send a text with 10DLC?
Each segment costs $0.0075/segment on the Standard rate. A $0.0045 per-segment carrier fee is added as a separate, itemized line. Replies are billed the same way, and an emoji can turn one text into several segments.
Is 10DLC brand vetting worth paying for?
Only if a daily cap is slowing your sends. Vetting raises your trust score, which can move your T-Mobile daily cap up a tier, but it doesn't change your per-second rate. Low-volume senders rarely see any benefit.
Do I pay 10DLC fees for every customer on my platform?
Yes, each sub-account carries its own registration and numbers. With one campaign and one number per customer, that's $27 a month per sub-account before any texts are sent. Price it into your plans as a fixed cost per customer.