If you're planning volume near the tier boundary, the mistake I see most often is someone multiplying their full monthly segment count by the Growth rate and calling it a budget. They see "$0.016 past 50,000" and pencil in 80,000 × $0.016 and wonder later why the invoice came in higher.
That's not how tiered pricing works, and it's not how Ready bills. The first 50,000 segments in a calendar month are still priced at the Standard rate. The discount applies to the segments above the boundary — which means your true cost is a blend of two rates, not one. Get the blend wrong and your forecast is off by hundreds of dollars a month at this volume.
Full disclosure: I work for Ready, so I have skin in the game here. But the math below is just arithmetic, and I'd rather you forecast correctly than get surprised by an invoice.
How the tiers actually work
Ready has two published per-segment tiers (Enterprise is negotiated separately — talk to us if you're there):
| Tier | Volume / month | Per segment | + carrier pass-through | All-in per segment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | 0–50,000 | $0.02 | $0.0045 | $0.0245 |
| Growth | segments past 50,000 (automatic) | $0.016 | $0.0045 | $0.0205 |
Two things to internalize before we do any math:
- The Growth rate is automatic and marginal. You don't pick a plan. Once your account crosses 50,000 segments in a calendar month, every additional segment prices at $0.016. The first 50,000 stay at $0.02. There's no retroactive re-pricing of the whole month.
- The $0.0045 carrier pass-through applies to every segment, both tiers. It's billed transparently and separately — not marked up. So it never gets a volume discount. That matters for the blend, because it drags your effective all-in rate toward the higher end.
The 80,000-segment worked example
Let's do the number the title promises. You send 80,000 segments in a calendar month.
First 50,000 segments — Standard rate:
- 50,000 × $0.02 = $1,000.00 (message cost)
Next 30,000 segments — Growth rate:
- 30,000 × $0.016 = $480.00 (message cost)
Message subtotal: $1,000 + $480 = $1,480.00
Carrier pass-through — all 80,000 segments, no discount:
- 80,000 × $0.0045 = $360.00
Total monthly spend: $1,480 + $360 = $1,840.00
Now divide back out to find your real blended per-segment cost:
- $1,840.00 ÷ 80,000 = $0.023 per segment, all-in
Compare that to the two wrong numbers people use:
- Naive Growth all-in: 80,000 × $0.0205 = $1,640 → understates by $200/mo
- Naive Standard all-in: 80,000 × $0.0245 = $1,960 → overstates by $120/mo
Your blended rate at 80,000 lands at $0.023, closer to the Standard all-in than the Growth all-in — because two-thirds of your volume is still priced at Standard, and the carrier fee never discounts.
Why the blend leans high near the boundary
The intuition trap is thinking "I'm a Growth customer now, so I pay Growth rates." You're a Growth customer on the margin, but your average is dominated by wherever the bulk of your volume sits.
At 80,000 segments, 62.5% of your volume (the first 50,000) is at Standard. Only 37.5% gets the discount. So your blended rate barely moves off Standard.
The blend only approaches $0.0205 when the majority of your volume is above the boundary — and that takes real scale. Here's the same all-in blended rate at several volumes:
| Monthly segments | Message cost | Carrier cost | Total | Blended all-in / seg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 55,000 | $1,080 | $247.50 | $1,327.50 | $0.02414 |
| 80,000 | $1,480 | $360 | $1,840 | $0.02300 |
| 120,000 | $2,120 | $540 | $2,660 | $0.02217 |
| 250,000 | $4,200 | $1,125 | $5,325 | $0.02130 |
| 500,000 | $8,200 | $2,250 | $10,450 | $0.02090 |
Notice the blended rate is an asymptote. It creeps toward $0.0205 as volume climbs, but it never actually gets there while any of your traffic sits in the Standard band. At half a million segments you're at $0.0209 — still a hair above the pure Growth all-in.
The formula, so you can forecast any month
For a given monthly segment count N where N > 50,000:
`` Message cost = (50,000 × $0.02) + ((N − 50,000) × $0.016) Carrier cost = N × $0.0045 Total = Message cost + Carrier cost Blended /seg = Total ÷ N ``
Drop that into a spreadsheet cell and you can sanity-check any forecast in seconds. If N ≤ 50,000, it's simpler: N × $0.0245.
The part everyone forgets: segment count ≠ message count
Every number above is in segments, not sends. If your forecast is built on "we send 80,000 texts a month," you may be badly under-counting, because a single message can be multiple billed segments.
The rules:
- A plain-text SMS is 160 GSM-7 characters per segment.
- Longer messages split into 153-character multipart segments.
- Any emoji or non-standard character (curly quotes, em-dashes from a copy-paste) drops the whole message to 70 characters per segment (67 for multipart).
Worked example. Say you send 40,000 contacts a 175-character promo with a single 🎉 in it. The emoji forces unicode encoding, so at 70/67 chars per segment that 175-character message is 3 segments:
- 40,000 contacts × 3 segments = 120,000 segments
You thought you sent 40,000 messages — under the boundary. You actually generated 120,000 segments, well into Growth territory, at the blended cost from the table above: 120,000 × $0.02217 ≈ $2,660. If you'd budgeted 40,000 × $0.0245 = $980, you're off by nearly 3×.
Strip the emoji and tighten the copy to 160 characters and that same blast is 1 segment per contact — 40,000 segments, $980. Same audience, one-third the bill. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do to control spend, and I've written more about it in reducing SMS costs without cutting volume — worth a read if the number above made you wince.
Where the boundary math changes your decisions
A few real planning implications once you understand the blend:
- Consolidating volume onto one account pulls you past the boundary faster. If you're an agency running many clients, the discount is calculated per Ready account, not per client. There are real reasons to consolidate and real reasons not to — I laid out both in when to consolidate GHL sub-account 10DLC registrations. The volume-pricing angle is one input, not the whole decision.
- Spiky months don't average. The boundary is per calendar month. If you run a Giving Tuesday-style surge that dumps most of your annual volume into one month, that month blends well but your quiet months are pure Standard. Don't forecast off an annual average — forecast month by month.
- Compliance costs sit outside the per-segment math. 10DLC registration (~$10/mo per brand, ~$20/mo per campaign) and optional add-ons like litigator/DNC scrubbing at $0.005 per contact are separate line items. They're small relative to segment spend at 80,000/mo, but include them so your budget is complete.
The practical takeaway
At the tier boundary, your real number is a blend, and near 50,000 that blend sits much closer to Standard ($0.0245) than to Growth ($0.0205). At 80,000 segments you're at $0.023 all-in — not $0.0205, not $0.016. The Growth discount is real and automatic, but it only meaningfully bends your average once the bulk of your traffic clears the boundary.
Two things to do before you finalize a forecast: run your volume in segments not messages (audit your templates for emoji and length first), and use the per-month formula above rather than an annual average.
If you want to check your own numbers against live pricing, the ReadySMS product and pricing page has the current tiers, and you can start with 2,500 free credits, no card required to test what your actual segment counts look like before you commit a budget to them.