How to choose an SMS marketing company: a buyer's checklist

Most SMS vendor comparisons come down to a pricing page and a feature grid. Both are close to useless on their own. A low per-message rate hides how segments are counted. A long feature list hides whether 10DLC registration is handled for you or left to you. Neither tells you what happens the first time a contact who never opted in gets a text.

This post is the checklist we would use to evaluate an SMS marketing company. It covers compliance support, integrations, pricing and reporting, with specific questions to ask in each area. We make Ready, so we will say where we fit. We will also say plainly where another kind of vendor is the better choice.

First, figure out which kind of vendor you need

"SMS marketing company" covers at least four different businesses. Comparing a raw API with a per-seat inbox app is like comparing flour with a bakery.

If you have engineers and want full control, a raw CPaaS is a reasonable choice. We wrote a separate guide on that path: how to choose a CPaaS SMS provider. The rest of this checklist assumes you want more than a send endpoint.

Compliance support: the part that decides whether your texts arrive

Carriers filter unregistered A2P traffic, and TCPA statutory damages run roughly $500 to $1,500 per text. Compliance support is the most important column in your comparison. Ask every vendor these questions:

1. Who registers the brand and campaign? Does the vendor run 10DLC registration inside the product, or hand you a link to a carrier form? What does it cost per month, and how long does approval usually take?
2. Is STOP handled automatically, everywhere? An opt-out should apply across every campaign and drip campaign, not just the one the contact replied to.
3. Are quiet hours enforced by the recipient's area? Check whether a send scheduled for 8 AM Eastern gets held for a contact in Pacific time (5 AM there), or goes out anyway.
4. Can you scrub against litigator and DNC lists before sending? Find out whether it's per contact or per segment, and whether it's on by default.
5. What does the vendor record about consent? Most platforms log sender attestations, not per-contact opt-in proof. Know which one you are getting.

Here is how we answer those, so you have a reference point:

• Registration runs in the app. It costs $25/mo for registration and $2 per number. There is no setup fee: the charge at submit is the first month, $25. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days. Teams with a platform can register their customers through the 10DLC registration API.
• STOP and UNSUBSCRIBE are honored automatically. The opt-out propagates, so that contact can't be texted again from any campaign.
• Quiet hours hold a send until the recipient's local permitted window. You are charged only when it actually sends. 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.
• Litigator and DNC scrubbing costs $0.003 extra per segment when switched on for an account, and it is off by default. The standalone TCPA and DNC litigator scrub is $0.005 per contact if you want to clean a list on its own.
• Attestation is recorded per bulk send and per API send that sets consent_attested: who sent it, to how many people, and when. That is an audit trail of your promise. It is not a per-contact consent record. Your signup form or store has to keep the opt-in time, wording and page URL.

One caveat applies to every vendor, including us. These tools reduce risk. They don't make you immune to lawsuits. Compliance stays the sender's responsibility. SMS should go to consented or replied leads, and cold outreach belongs on phone and mail. For a deeper version of this section, see what a 10DLC compliance platform should do for you.

Pricing: compare segments, not "messages"

Carriers bill by segment, so vendors do too, whatever the pricing page says. The rules:

• One GSM-7 segment holds 160 characters. Longer texts split into 153-character segments.
• One emoji or other non-GSM character drops the limit to 70 characters (67 per segment in multipart texts).
• A 140-character text with one emoji is 3 segments, not 1.

Ask each vendor three questions. Is the carrier fee included or passed through? Are inbound replies billed? Are compliance features extra?

Worked example: one campaign, two versions

Assumptions: 5,000 opted-in contacts on our Standard rate of $0.0075/segment, plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment. Scrubbing is off.

• Plain 140-character text (1 segment): 5,000 × 1 × $0.0075. That is $38 in rate plus 5,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees.
• Same text with one emoji (3 segments): 5,000 × 3 × $0.0075. That is $113 in rate plus 15,000 × $0.0045 in carrier fees.

Ready's all-in prices per segment include the carrier fee but not screening: Scrub lists and Number validation, the two switches in Settings under Compliance, each add $0.003 per segment when switched on, shown as screening on your bill, and both are off by default. Unless you turn the opt-out footer off, the first text to each contact, and one again from time to time, also gets "Reply STOP to opt out" and your business name if the message does not already have them, so a text close to the segment limit can bill one more segment.

The emoji tripled the bill. Replies are billed like sent texts, so an engaged, opted-in list that answers adds real volume.

Being straight about price

Twilio's raw rate (about $0.0083/segment) and GoHighLevel's LeadConnector (about $0.0083/message, around $0.0128 all-in) are lower per message than our Standard rate. If per-segment price is your only criterion, those win.

Our case rests on what is included. You get self-serve registration, compliance tooling, a CRM with pipeline and automations, and a unified inbox, all in one place. The rate is the same at every volume. Enterprise pricing is custom, so talk to us. Per-seat and subscription tools often end up costing more once seats and overages are counted. Run the math on your own volume. The full fee breakdown is in 10DLC cost: every fee explained, and our card is at tryready.com/pricing.

Integrations: where your contacts already live

A vendor that doesn't connect to your CRM turns every campaign into a CSV export. Ask:

• Is the integration native or a third-party connector? Native two-way sync means replies show up where your team works.
• Is there a real API? You want idempotency, so a retried request doesn't send twice, plus documented opt-out endpoints.
• Can it separate customers or brands? Agencies and software platforms need sub-accounts, each with its own numbers and registration.

On Ready, the GoHighLevel integration is native via OAuth. It syncs inbound and outbound messages both ways, mapped per GHL location to the matching sub-account, so each one stays isolated.

The REST API sends single texts with POST /v1/messages and bulk texts with POST /v1/messages/bulk (up to 100 recipients per call). Every request takes an Idempotency-Key header and a consent_attested flag. Sub-accounts are created over the same API. AI agents can connect through our MCP server.

Docs for all of this are at docs.tryready.com/api/messages.

Reporting: can you reconcile the bill?

Dashboards with open-rate charts look nice. SMS has no reliable "open," though, so be skeptical of vendors that report one. The reporting that matters:

• Delivery and failure status per message, so you can find bad numbers.
• Opt-out lists you can export or query, so suppression carries over if you ever switch vendors.
• An itemized bill, with carrier fees separated from the vendor's rate, so you can check segment counts against what you sent.

We bill through prepaid credits via Stripe, with carrier fees itemized separately. Messages and opt-outs can be pulled over the API (GET /v1/messages, GET /v1/opt-outs).

Whichever vendor you choose, export a month of message logs during the trial and check them against the invoice. If the vendor can't give you the data to do that, treat it as a red flag.

Throughput: ask what "fast" actually means

Carriers publish no official rate card, so treat any number a vendor quotes as an approximation. Here is roughly what to expect:

• A fresh standard campaign sends about 1 to 4 segments per second.
• Higher use-case tiers reach tens of segments per second.
• T-Mobile daily caps run from about 2,000 to about 200,000 messages per day, depending on brand trust score.

At an assumed 4 segments per second, our 5,000-contact plain-text campaign takes about 21 minutes. The emoji version takes about an hour.

A vendor that promises instant sends to 100,000 contacts on a new brand is either wrong or not telling you something. Brand vetting ($79 Standard / $179 Enhanced, one-time) can raise your trust score. It is only worth paying for at higher volumes.

Where Ready fits, and where it doesn't

Ready is a good fit in three situations:

• You are a software platform texting on behalf of your customers and need sub-accounts and a registration API.
• You run GoHighLevel and want an LC Phone alternative with compliance built in.
• You are any business (ecommerce, healthcare, a nonprofit, a local shop) that wants registration, scrubbing and an inbox in one tool, without stitching vendors together.

Nonprofits sending donation appeals and campaigns texting voters need our written OK first. Email support@tryready.com before the first appeal and wait for our reply.

Ready is not the right fit in two cases. If you want the lowest possible per-segment price and have engineers to build compliance yourself, a raw CPaaS makes more sense. If you need a Shopify-first flow builder above everything else, a dedicated ecommerce tool may serve you better.

The short version

Pick a vendor type first, then score each candidate on four things:

1. Does it handle registration and opt-outs for you?
2. Does it bill in segments you can audit?
3. Does it connect to where your contacts live?
4. Does it give you the data to reconcile the bill?

For a broader look at features that matter and features that don't, see SMS marketing software.

If you want to test us, sign up. To send, you add a card and get a number, which is $2 a month with the first month charged when you get it. The first 20 one-to-one texts are free, so use them before you pay for registration.