If you run a business with a phone number on its website, someone has probably pitched you a "mobile marketing package." It usually promises tens of thousands of texts, a ready-made audience, "guaranteed delivery" and a flat monthly price. Some of these vendors are legitimate software and service companies. Others are reselling a contact list and sending from numbers that carriers will filter within days, and the TCPA exposure lands on you, not them.

This post gives you questions that separate the two. It covers consent, carrier registration, speed claims, pricing and reporting. We make Ready, a texting platform, so we have a stake here. We sell software and bill carrier fees as a separate line. We do not sell lists. That shapes where we think the line sits, and we explain why below.

What you're actually being sold

Mobile marketing vendors usually fall into one of three types:

  • Software platforms. You bring your own opted-in contacts, register your own brand, and send through their app or API. You own the list and the risk.
  • Managed services. An agency writes and sends campaigns for you on a platform. That is fine if the contacts are yours and consented.
  • List-plus-send packages. The vendor supplies the audience. This is the type to be most careful with.

Before you go further, ask which of these the vendor is. If the answer is fuzzy, that tells you something.

Consent: where did the numbers come from?

Ask this first, because everything else depends on it. Marketing texts in the US need prior express written consent from the person you are texting. Statutory damages under the TCPA run $500 to $1,500 per text. A list of 10,000 purchased numbers is not 10,000 leads. It is 10,000 potential claims.

Ask the vendor:

  • Who collected the opt-in, and on whose behalf? Consent given to "Vendor X and partners" generally does not cover your business texting that person.
  • Can you see the record for any single contact? That means the opt-in time, the exact wording, and the page or form URL. If they can't produce it, assume it doesn't exist.
  • How are STOP replies handled across campaigns? An opt-out has to stick everywhere, not just in the campaign where someone replied.

Our position is simple. Cold outreach happens by phone and mail. SMS goes to people who opted in or who already replied to you. Any vendor whose model depends on texting strangers is selling you their risk. If you need help writing a compliant opt-in, our opt-in examples post has wording that carriers approve.

Registration: whose brand, whose campaign

Business texting from regular 10-digit numbers requires A2P 10DLC registration. A brand record identifies the business, and a campaign record describes what it sends. Carriers filter unregistered traffic heavily. See the 10DLC rules and requirements for what they check.

Questions to ask:

  • Is the brand registered under your business's legal name and EIN, or the vendor's? If it's the vendor's, your messages ride on their reputation. They can also be cut off along with every other customer of that vendor.
  • What use case is the campaign registered for? It should match what you send. A reminders campaign used for promotions is a common reason traffic gets throttled.
  • What does registration cost, and who pays monthly? Real costs are modest. On Ready it's $25/mo for registration plus $2 per number, with $25 charged at submit as the first month and no setup fee. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. A vendor charging a large "compliance setup fee" should be able to explain exactly what it covers. Our 10DLC cost breakdown itemizes every fee.

Speed and deliverability claims: do the math

"Send 100,000 texts in an hour" is a claim you can test with arithmetic. Carriers publish no official rate card, so these figures are rough approximations.

  • A new standard 10DLC campaign without vetting typically gets about 1 to 4 segments per second.
  • T-Mobile caps each brand per day according to its trust score. The lowest tier is about 2,000 messages a day. Higher tiers run roughly 10,000, 40,000, 100,000 and 200,000.

At an assumed 4 segments per second, 100,000 segments takes 25,000 seconds, which is roughly 7 hours. That assumes nothing else limits you. At the lowest T-Mobile tier, a brand-new brand can't reach 100,000 T-Mobile subscribers in a day at all.

If a vendor promises far more, they are either sending on a shared or unregistered route or overstating. Neither is good for you. Brand vetting ($79 Standard or $179 Enhanced, one-time) can raise the daily cap if it moves you up a tier. For most senders standard registration is enough. Our post on whether vetting is worth $79 covers when it pays off.

"Guaranteed delivery" deserves the same skepticism. No one can guarantee what carriers' content filters will do.

Pricing: per message or per segment?

Carriers bill by segment, not by message. One GSM-7 segment holds 160 characters. Longer texts split into 153-character segments. Adding a single emoji switches the whole text to unicode, which drops the limits to 70 characters, or 67 per part in a multipart message.

Worked example (assumed figures): a 175-character promotion with one emoji is 3 unicode segments. You send it to 5,000 opted-in contacts.

  • Segments: 5,000 × 3 = 15,000
  • On Ready Standard: 15,000 × $0.0075 = $113, plus 15,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fee
  • The total excludes the compliance surcharge. TCPA/DNC scrubbing and landline validation each add $0.003 per segment when switched on, and both are off by default.

Remove the emoji and the same 175 characters fit in 2 GSM segments, which cuts the segment count by a third. When a vendor quotes "per message," ask how they count a 3-segment text. If the answer is "it's still one message," check whether there's a character limit or an overage line hidden somewhere.

To be clear, raw carrier APIs such as Twilio, and GoHighLevel's LeadConnector, charge less per segment than our Standard rate. If you have engineers and only need a pipe, that may be the right call. What we bundle in is self-serve registration, the compliance tooling, two-way inbox, campaigns and contacts.

Reporting and data ownership

You should be able to export, at any time:

  • Every message sent and received, with delivery status
  • Opt-outs, as a list you can import elsewhere
  • Your contacts and any custom fields

Also check for:

  • Segment-level billing. Carrier fees should be shown on their own line so the bill makes sense.
  • An audit trail. It should record who sent which campaign, to how many people, and when.

On Ready, the sender's consent attestation is logged for each campaign you send and each API send that attests consent. That record is not per-contact proof of consent, though. You keep the opt-in record itself, meaning the time, wording and form, in your own systems.

If a vendor won't let you export opt-outs, leaving them means re-texting people who said stop.

The vetting checklist

  1. Do I supply the contacts, or do they? If they do, stop here unless they can show per-contact consent naming my business.
  2. Is the 10DLC brand registered under my legal name and EIN?
  3. Does the campaign use case match what I'll actually send?
  4. Are STOP replies honored automatically and across all campaigns?
  5. Are sends held outside quiet hours based on the recipient's local time? 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.
  6. Is pricing per segment, with carrier fees itemized?
  7. Do the speed claims hold up against roughly 1 to 4 segments per second and T-Mobile's daily caps?
  8. Can I export messages, contacts and opt-outs whenever I want?
  9. Is there optional litigator/DNC scrubbing? (Ready's standalone scrub is $0.005 per contact.)
  10. Will they put all of this in the contract?

For agencies sending on behalf of clients, liability gets more complicated. Our post on who gets sued when a client's list is bad goes through it.

Where Ready fits, and where it doesn't

Ready is software. You register your own brand in-app, or register your customers' brands through sub-accounts if you're a platform. You send SMS through the app, through the messaging API, or natively inside GoHighLevel. STOP handling and quiet hours are built in. Scrubbing and landline validation are available as options.

The first 20 texts are free one-to-one sends. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it.

We're not a fit if you want someone to hand you an audience. We're also probably not the right choice if you only need the lowest per-segment price and will build compliance yourself.

The practical takeaway

A good vendor will answer three questions plainly: who consented, whose brand is registered, and what you can export. Run the arithmetic on any speed or price claim. Treat any vendor who brings the list with suspicion.

If you want to see what a software-only setup looks like, check the features and pricing, or sign up and send your first few one-to-one texts before registering.