Best business phone number and app for texting and calling

Most small businesses start out with the owner's personal cell. Within a year or two, that number is on the website, the van, the Google Business Profile and a few hundred customers' phones. Then the owner hires someone, or wants an evening off, or a customer texts a photo of a leak at 11 PM, and it becomes clear the business needs its own line.

The options vary a lot in how well they handle texting. Some phone systems are built for calls and add texting on top. Some apps charge per seat. Some are raw APIs that assume you have a developer. This post compares them on the four things that decide whether a business line works for texting: real texting support, carrier registration, price and number portability. We make Ready, so we've been specific about where it fits and where it doesn't.

What a business line actually has to do

Before comparing apps, it helps to know why texting is the hard part. Calls on a business line mostly just work. Texts from a business number are a different case.

US carriers treat texts from a regular 10-digit business number as A2P (application-to-person) traffic. That traffic has to be registered under A2P 10DLC: a brand registration (who you are) and a campaign registration (what you send and how people opted in). Unregistered business texts get filtered by carriers. Messages show as sent in your app and never arrive. If you're new to this, our 10DLC explainer covers the basics.

That means any business phone app you pick should do four things:

1. Send and receive texts from the business number, with a shared inbox so more than one person can reply.
2. Handle 10DLC registration in the app, or at least walk you through it clearly.
3. Price texting in a way you can predict. That could be per seat, per segment or a bundle. Know which one you're on.
4. Let you take the number with you. Porting in and porting out both matter, because the number is the asset.

The options, compared

Here is how the common choices compare. We've kept competitor pricing qualitative except where we have figures we can stand behind.

Your personal cell

This costs nothing extra and works fine until you hire someone. After that, it fails in three ways. Nobody else can answer, you can't separate work from home, and carriers can filter business-style traffic sent from a consumer line. Our post on business SMS vs texting from your personal phone goes deeper on this.

Google Voice

Google Voice is a reasonable free or low-cost second number for one person making calls. For business texting it runs into limits on volume, sharing and registration. We wrote up those limits in Google Voice for business texting. If you mostly make calls and send the occasional text to someone you already know, it may be enough. That's an honest answer.

VoIP phone suites

RingCentral, Zoom Phone, Nextiva and GoTo are strong calling systems with extensions, IVR menus and desk phones. If your business runs on inbound calls and a front desk, one of these is often the right core tool. Texting is a secondary feature in these products, and each one has its own 10DLC process. We compared those processes in 10DLC registration on Zoom, RingCentral, Nextiva, GoTo and Genesys.

Per-seat texting apps

Per-seat apps give each team member a login and a shared inbox, and they're easy to use. The per-seat model is the catch. The cost grows with headcount, not with how much you text. A five-person team that sends a few hundred texts a month pays for five seats either way.

Raw CPaaS APIs

Twilio and similar providers charge less per segment than Ready. Twilio is around $0.0083 a segment. GoHighLevel's LeadConnector phone is around $0.0083 a message, or about $0.0128 with carrier fees. If you have a developer and only need an API, those are good choices. The tradeoff is that you build the inbox, opt-out handling, quiet hours and registration workflow yourself.

Where Ready fits: texting-first, with calling included

Ready is a messaging platform built around texting. You get a business number, a two-way Inbox, bulk campaigns, drip campaigns, templates and contact management in one app. Calling comes from the built-in Ready Dialer. It also has a REST API if you or your developer want to send texts from your own systems. The quickstart covers that.

The parts that matter most for a small business are mostly about compliance:

• Registration in the app. You fill in brand and campaign details in Ready, and we submit them. There's no setup fee. The charge at submit is the first month, $25. After that, it's $25/mo for registration + $2 per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days.
• Texting while you wait. An account can send up to 500 texts a month before it registers, at the normal per-text rate. If you buy a number before registering, it sends on Ready's shared registration at the same rate while yours is in review.
• Automatic STOP handling. When a contact replies STOP, the opt-out applies everywhere, so they can't be texted again from any campaign.
• Quiet hours. Sends outside permitted hours for the recipient's area are held and go out later. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.
• Optional scrubbing. You can screen out known TCPA-litigator and DNC-complainer numbers. TCPA exposure runs roughly $500 to $1,500 per text, and the standalone scrub is $0.005 per contact. You can scrub a list with POST /v1/scrub or one number with GET /v1/scrub/:phone (scrub docs). That reduces risk but doesn't make you lawsuit-proof. Compliance is still your responsibility, and you should text only people who opted in or have already been in touch with you.

Calling on the same number

The Ready Dialer gives you click-to-call from a dial pad in the dashboard, consented call recording and transcripts, inbound calls that ring the open pad, and a Missed call card in the Inbox thread for each call you miss. It costs $0.025 a minute, with each started minute billed in full. Only answered time is billed, so a ring-out costs nothing. There are no seat plans, and every answered minute bills at that same $0.025 rate.

Ready doesn't have IVR menus, extensions, desk-phone support or auto-dialing. If your business runs on a busy phone tree, keep a VoIP suite for calls and consider Ready for texting.

Optional: the blue line

On iPhones, a blue line sends your texts as iMessage, showing your business name and photo. It needs no 10DLC registration, so you can start texting as soon as the line is set up. It costs $99 a month per line plus 6 cents a segment, and replies are also 6 cents a segment. Each line can start up to 50 new conversations a day. Texts to Android phones go from your regular number at the regular rate if you already had a number; if the blue line came with its green number, your account's texts bill at 6 cents a segment once you register. The blue line is optional, and most small businesses start without it. Details are in the blue line guide.

Worked example: a five-person service business

These are assumptions, not a quote. Say a home-services company with one number sends 1,500 segments a month in appointment reminders and follow-ups. It receives 1,000 segments of replies and has 300 answered call minutes.

• Texting: Replies are billed like sent texts, so that's 2,500 segments × $0.0075, plus 2,500 × $0.0045 in carrier fee.
• Registration: $25 for registration + $2 for one number.
• Calling: 300 minutes × $0.025 = $8.
• No seat charges. Scrubbing and landline validation are off by default. If you turn them on, each adds $0.003 per segment.

Watch your segment counts. A single SMS segment holds 160 characters, but one emoji drops that limit to 70. A 175-character reminder with an emoji is 3 segments instead of 2. If this business added an emoji to every outbound text, those 1,500 segments could become about 2,250.

Porting: protect the number before you print it

Whatever you choose, ask two questions before you put the number on signage:

1. Can I bring my existing number in? If customers already know your number, moving it is better than starting over.
2. Can I take it out later, and what does that require? That usually means account details, a recent bill and sometimes a PIN from the current carrier.

On Ready you port numbers in yourself from the Numbers page: one form and a signed letter of authorization. The guide is at docs.tryready.com/guides/port-numbers. Get the port-out answer in writing from any provider, including us.

How to choose

• Mostly calls, front desk, phone tree: a VoIP suite. Plan for its 10DLC process.
• One person, light texting to people you already know: Google Voice may be fine.
• You have a developer and want the lowest per-segment price: a raw CPaaS like Twilio.
• Texting is how customers reach you, the team is growing and you'd like registration handled in the app: Ready.

If texting-first sounds right, you can sign up and use the first 20 free one-to-one texts to try the inbox before you pay for registration. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it. To plan your first campaigns, start with SMS marketing for small business, and see the pricing page for the per-segment rate.