Getting a business phone number for an LLC or new company

You filed the LLC, got the EIN, and now every form wants a phone number: the bank application, Google Business Profile, Stripe, the state filing, the vendor portal. Using your personal cell works for about a week. Then your personal number is printed on invoices, saved in strangers' CRMs, and tied to an entity you might sell, close or hand to a partner someday.

A separate business line fixes that. The catch most founders hit later is that "a phone number" and "a number that can legally text customers at scale" are different things in the US. This post covers which kind of number to get, what it costs, how 10DLC registration fits in, and how to keep the line text-enabled from day one.

What the number actually has to do

Before you pick a provider, list the jobs the number does. For most new LLCs the list looks like this:

1. Identity and verification. Bank onboarding, payment processors, and directory listings send codes to it or call it.
2. Public contact. It goes on your website, Google listing, invoices and email signature.
3. Inbound calls. Customers and vendors ring it.
4. Outbound texting. Appointment reminders, order updates, quote follow-ups, replies to leads who texted you first.

Jobs 1 through 3 are easy; almost any number does them. Job 4 is where the choice matters, because business texting from a standard 10-digit number (10DLC) has to be registered with the carriers or it gets filtered.

Your number options, honestly compared

A sensible setup for many LLCs is two numbers. One is a carrier mobile line used only for verification codes and account recovery, so nothing important depends on a VoIP number that a bank might reject. The other is the public business number, registered for texting, that goes on your site and listings. If you only want one number, make it the registered one and test it with your bank before you print it anywhere.

If you're weighing toll-free against local, our 10DLC vs toll-free vs long code vs RCS breakdown walks through which sender type fits which business.

Why texting needs registration (and why an LLC helps)

US carriers treat business-to-consumer texting from software as A2P (application-to-person) traffic. A2P traffic on a local number has to run on a registered 10DLC brand and campaign. Unregistered traffic gets filtered, and filtered texts look delivered on your end while never showing up on the customer's phone. If you're unsure whether your texting counts, A2P vs P2P texting covers the line.

Registration happens in two parts:

• Brand: your legal business. For an LLC that's the exact legal name on your IRS EIN letter, the EIN, and your business address. Mismatches between the name you type and the IRS record are one of the most common reasons a brand fails, so copy it from the letter, punctuation included.
• Campaign: what you'll send and how people opt in. Carriers want the use case (reminders, customer care, marketing), sample messages and your opt-in flow. On Ready, the app files the campaign for you; over the API you set use_case.

Carriers also check your website. They want a working site, a privacy policy that says you don't share mobile numbers with third parties for marketing, and terms that cover texting. A brand-new LLC with a placeholder site gets rejected more often than one with real pages. Our website, privacy policy and terms guide has templates you can adapt.

Having the LLC and EIN already done puts you ahead. You're registering a real entity with a verifiable tax ID, which is the cleanest path through brand review.

What it costs: a worked example

Here's the Ready math for a new company. We make Ready, so we'll use our own numbers. Every figure below comes from our published pricing.

Registration (monthly):

• Brand: $10/mo
• Campaign: $20/mo
• Each number: $2/mo

There's no setup fee. At submit you pay the first month of brand plus campaign, $25. After that, a one-number LLC pays $25/mo for registration and $2/mo for the number. The full breakdown, including what other providers layer on, is in 10DLC cost: every fee explained.

Texting: Standard is $0.0075 per segment, sent or received, plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment itemized separately. It's one flat rate.

Example assumptions: a new home-services LLC sends 300 appointment reminders a month, each one segment (under 160 plain characters), and gets 150 one-segment replies back.

• Segments: 300 sent + 150 received = 450
• Texting: 450 × $0.0075
• Carrier fee: 450 × $0.0045
• Registration and number: $25 for registration + $2

That all-in figure excludes the optional compliance surcharge. TCPA/DNC scrubbing and landline validation are each $0.003 extra per segment when you switch them on, and both are off by default.

Segment math: keep messages plain. A 175-character promo with one emoji isn't 2 segments, it's 3. The emoji forces unicode encoding, which drops each segment to 70 characters (67 when the message is split). At 1,000 contacts that's 3,000 segments instead of 2,000. Ready swaps curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses for plain ones before sending, so those don't inflate the count. Emojis still do.

Calls: if you want calling on the same number, the Ready Dialer is $0.025/min. You're billed only for answered time, and each started minute counts as a full minute. Ring-outs and busy signals cost nothing.

Where Ready isn't the lowest price per segment: raw carrier APIs like Twilio (around $0.0083 per segment) and GoHighLevel's LeadConnector (around $0.0083 per message) cost less per text. With those you assemble registration, inbox, opt-out handling and quiet hours yourself, or live with what's bundled. With Ready you get registration handled in the app, a two-way inbox, campaigns, contacts and automations together. If you're a developer happy to build that stack yourself, a raw API is a reasonable choice.

Setting it up on Ready, step by step

1. Sign up and add a card. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it.
2. Buy a local number in your area code.
3. Use your free texts first. The first 20 texts are free one-to-one sends, such as testing with your own phone or replying to a lead. Campaigns are paid from the first text. The free texts end as soon as you pay for registration, so use them before you register.
4. Submit registration in the app. Enter your legal business name, EIN and address, then pick the number to register. We write the campaign for you. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days.
5. Keep working while you wait. An account can send up to 500 texts a month before it registers, at the normal per-text rate. If you bought your number before registering, it sends on Ready's shared registration at the same rate while your own is in review.
6. Put the number everywhere once it's live: website, Google Business Profile, invoices.

If you're technical and want to text from your own app, sending is one request. Use any UUID as the Idempotency-Key so a retried request never sends twice:

POST https://api.tryready.com/v1/messages
X-API-Key: <your key>
Idempotency-Key: 6f1c2a9e-4b7d-4e2a-9c1f-1a2b3c4d5e6f

{"to": "+12125550199", "body": "Your order #1042 has shipped.", "consent_attested": true}

The quickstart and messages API docs cover the rest, and GET /v1/registration returns where your 10DLC review stands.

Compliance you get, and what's still on you

New companies tend to underbuild this, so here's what Ready does automatically:

• STOP handling: an inbound STOP or UNSUBSCRIBE opts the contact out across every campaign. Opted-out numbers are refused before sending and you aren't charged.
• Quiet hours: texts that would land outside permitted hours in the recipient's area are held and sent later. You're charged only when they actually send. 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.
• Attestation log: each bulk send and each API send that sets consent_attested records who sent it, to how many people, and when.
• Optional scrubbing: switch on TCPA-litigator and DNC screening for $0.003 per segment, or run the standalone scrub at $0.005 per contact.

Here's what Ready doesn't do. The attestation log isn't a per-contact consent record. It doesn't store when each person opted in, the wording they saw, or the page they used. Your website form or booking tool keeps that, so make sure it does. Text people who opted in or texted you first. Reach cold contacts by phone or mail. Consent is the sender's responsibility, and the tooling reduces risk rather than removing it. TCPA damages run $500 to $1,500 per text, so this matters. (A contact who signs up on a Ready-hosted opt-in page is the exception: Ready stores that sign-up, with the time, IP address and exact wording, and support@tryready.com can send you a copy.)

Should you also get a blue line?

If many of your customers use iPhones, a Ready blue line sends as iMessage, showing your business name and photo in blue. It needs no 10DLC registration, so it works as soon as it's set up. It costs $99/mo per line plus 6 cents per segment, sent or replied. Each line can start up to 50 new conversations a day. Texts to Android phones go out 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. For most new LLCs it's an upgrade to consider later, not a day-one requirement. See the blue line docs.

The short version

Get a separate business number before your personal cell ends up on every form. If you can, keep a carrier mobile line for verification codes and use a registered local number as your public line. Register the brand with the exact legal name from your EIN letter. Put a real privacy policy on your site. Budget for the monthly registration and one number, plus $0.0075 per segment and the carrier fee for texting. If that setup fits, start with the free texts to test before you submit registration.