Call broadcasting promises something simple: record one message, upload a list, and reach thousands of people in an afternoon. A lot of that list will never hear it. Unknown numbers get screened, carriers label high-volume callers as spam, and federal law treats a prerecorded call as one of the most regulated things a business can do on a phone. The per-call price is low, but each one carries legal exposure and only a minority of people pick up.
The setup we'd recommend for most teams is different: send a consented, two-way text first, then call the people who reply, with a person on the line. This post covers the rules that make voice broadcasting risky, why answer rates keep falling, and what the text-then-call approach costs, with the math shown.
What the TCPA says about prerecorded calls
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act puts "artificial or prerecorded voice" calls in their own category. The rules tighten with the purpose of the call. This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice:
- Calls to cell phones with a prerecorded or artificial voice need the recipient's prior express consent. If the call is telemarketing, that consent has to be prior express written consent: a signed agreement, which can be electronic, naming your business.
- Telemarketing calls to residential landlines with a prerecorded voice also need prior express written consent.
- Every prerecorded call has to identify the business at the start. Telemarketing calls also need an automated, interactive way to opt out during the call.
- Calling hours are 8 AM to 9 PM in the recipient's local time under federal rules. Several states set narrower windows.
- AI-generated voices count as "artificial." In 2024 the FCC confirmed that voice-cloning and AI voices fall under the same prerecorded-call rules. Swapping a recording for a synthetic voice changes nothing.
Statutory damages run $500 per violating call, up to $1,500 if willful. A broadcast to 5,000 numbers with a consent problem on 10% of them is 500 potential violations, which works out to $250,000 at the low end. That arithmetic is why plaintiffs' firms watch this space. Ringless voicemail doesn't escape it either: the FCC has ruled it is a call under the TCPA. Our ringless voicemail vs SMS breakdown covers the details.
For dialer equipment questions such as autodialers, predictive dialers and where the legal lines sit, see are auto dialers legal.
Why answer rates make broadcasting worse every year
Legal risk is one problem. Reach is the other.
Carriers label you before anyone hears the message
Carriers and their analytics partners score outbound calling patterns. A number placing thousands of short calls in a burst, with few answered and many hung up early, matches the profile of a robocaller, and the number gets a "Spam Likely" or "Scam Likely" label. STIR/SHAKEN attestation helps prove the call isn't spoofed, but it doesn't stop a legitimately signed number from being flagged for behaving like a broadcaster. If you've already seen this happen, why your number shows up as spam explains the mechanics.
People don't answer unknown numbers
As a rough industry approximation, a large share of consumers no longer pick up calls from numbers they don't recognize, and iPhone and Android both offer settings that silence unknown callers entirely. Add a spam label and the share of people who actually hear a broadcast drops further. Voicemail catches some of the rest, but a prerecorded message in a voicemail box is still a prerecorded call under the law.
There's no conversation
A broadcast is one-way. Someone who wants to respond has to call back, press a key in an IVR menu, or ignore it. A text works differently: the recipient answers in the same thread, on their own schedule, and you know right away who is interested.
Voice broadcasting vs SMS plus live calls
| Voice broadcasting | Consented SMS, then live calls | |
|---|---|---|
| Consent bar | Prior express written consent for telemarketing, cell or residential | Express consent for texts; written for marketing texts |
| Carrier treatment | High-volume patterns get spam-labelled | Registered 10DLC traffic on approved campaigns |
| Reaches someone who doesn't answer | Only via voicemail, still regulated | Text sits in the inbox until read |
| Two-way | IVR keypress at best | Full reply thread |
| Cost of a no-answer | Usually billed per attempt or per connect | On the Ready Dialer, a call nobody picks up costs nothing |
| Who you end up calling | Everyone on the list | Only people who replied or asked for a call |
The right column skips the hardest part of the left one. You aren't playing a recording to people who never asked to hear it. You text people who opted in, and a person calls the ones who answer.
The setup: text first, call second
1. Text the people who consented
Start with leads who gave you consent to text: form fills, past customers, people who texted you first. Cold contact belongs on phone and mail, handled by a person and under the rules for live calls. SMS is for consented and replied leads.
Keep the first message short and specific so it fits in one segment (160 plain characters; one emoji drops the limit to 70):
Hi Dana, it's Marcus at Ridgeline Roofing. You asked about a roof quote last week. Want a quick call today or tomorrow? Reply STOP to opt out.
That's about 140 characters: one segment.
2. Let replies sort the list
Opted-in lists reply. Replies come in a few kinds: "yes, call me at 4," a question you can answer by text, a "not now," or STOP. On Ready, STOP is honored automatically and the opt-out carries across every campaign, so that person can't be texted again by mistake.
3. Call the people who said yes, by hand
This is where the Ready Dialer fits. It is click-to-call from the dial pad in the Ready dashboard or inside GoHighLevel. It offers consented call recording and transcripts. Inbound callbacks ring whoever has the pad open, and missed calls show up as a Missed call card in the contact's Inbox thread. It does not auto-dial, run queues or drop voicemails. A person clicks every call, which keeps you on the live-call side of the TCPA line.
The time between reply and call matters a lot. If someone texts "call me now" and the phone rings within a few minutes, you're reaching a person who is holding their phone and expecting you.
Worked example: 1,000 opted-in leads
The assumptions below are illustrative, not a Ready statistic:
- 1,000 opted-in leads, one-segment first text
- 30% reply (300 replies, each one segment)
- 120 of them ask for a call; you place 120 calls
- 90 connect, averaging 4 started minutes each; 30 ring out
At Standard pricing ($0.0075 per segment plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment; replies are billed like sent texts):
- Outbound texts: 1,000 × $0.0075, plus 1,000 × $0.0045 carrier fees
- Inbound replies: 300 × $0.0075, plus 300 × $0.0045 carrier fees
- Calls: 90 × 4 minutes × $0.025/min = $9.00. The 30 ring-outs cost $0, because only answered time is billed.
The figures above exclude the compliance surcharge. Litigator/DNC scrubbing and landline validation are off by default. Each adds $0.003 per segment when switched on for the account.
What you get for that: 90 live conversations with people who asked to talk, a written thread with everyone else, and no prerecorded calls at all. Whatever a broadcast vendor charges per call, the bigger costs are the exposure on every unconsented number and the people you never actually reach.
Registration comes before you send campaigns: $25 at submit for the first month, then $25/mo for registration + $2 per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. The details are in our 10DLC cost guide.
The compliance stack that comes with it
On Ready these layers are built in, so you don't have to add them separately:
- Quiet hours: texts sent outside the recipient's permitted local hours are held and sent later, and charged only when they go out. 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.
- Automatic STOP handling that applies across every campaign.
- TCPA litigator and DNC scrubbing: $0.003 per segment when switched on for the account, or $0.005 per contact as a standalone scrub. The lawsuit-vs-scrub math shows why that's cheap insurance.
- Consent attestation: each bulk send and each API send that sets
consent_attestedrecords who sent it, to how many contacts, and when. It is not a per-contact consent record. Your forms and your CRM keep the opt-in time, wording and page URL for each contact.
None of this makes you lawsuit-proof. Compliance stays the sender's responsibility. These layers remove the most common ways teams get caught.
If you're texting advocacy alerts, donation appeals or voters, email support@tryready.com before the first send and wait for our reply. Signing up and registering isn't enough on its own for those uses.
If you build software and want to offer this flow to your own customers, the same send is a POST /v1/messages call with consent_attested: true. Each customer gets a sub-account with its own numbers and registration. See docs.tryready.com/api/messages.
When voice broadcasting is still fine
To be fair to the other side: informational prerecorded calls to people who gave consent can be legal and appropriate. Examples include school closures, utility outage notices, and some appointment and emergency alerts, particularly for audiences who mostly use landlines. If that's your situation, a dedicated notification vendor may suit you better than we do. Ready doesn't send prerecorded calls.
For sales and marketing, though, broadcasting puts the heaviest legal requirements on the channel with the weakest reach.
The practical takeaway
Drop the recording. Text consented leads one short message, let the replies tell you who wants to talk, and call those people yourself within minutes. You'll reach fewer people than a broadcast nominally does, but more of them will actually hear from you, and none of it is a prerecorded call.
If you want to try it, your first 20 one-to-one texts are free (a card on file is required to send). Use them to test your opener before you register. Then compare the numbers on pricing or sign up when you're ready.