Best SMS and text marketing platforms compared, ranked on which vendor publishes the per message arithmetic

SMS is the only marketing channel where the unit cost is charged to you per message and set by somebody who is not your vendor. That makes one question more important than every feature comparison put together, and it is whether the vendor will show you the whole sum before you sign.

The criterion this page ranks on

Does the vendor publish, on its own pricing page, what one message costs you including the carrier fee, and what you pay when you go over the plan. Nothing else on an SMS platform costs you money in a way that can surprise you. The automation builder cannot. The per message arithmetic can, every month, for as long as you use it.

EZ Texting is first, and it is the only vendor publishing the complete sum

Read at eztexting.com/pricing on 21 October 2026, the whole ladder renders with the overage attached to each rung. Launch at 25 dollars a month, or 20 billed annually, includes 500 monthly credits with overage at 4 cents a credit. Boost at 75 dollars a month, or 60 annually, same credits, overage at 3.5 cents. Scale at 125 dollars a month, or 100 annually, overage at 3 cents. Enterprise is published as starting at 3,000 dollars a month with 200,000 monthly credits and overage at 1 cent, and it routes to "Let's Talk" for a quote.

And it publishes the fee that catches people out. In its own words, "The $5/month Telecom Fee covers mandatory carrier fees for Launch plan customers", and "This fee is waived for Boost, Scale, and Enterprise plans." For ten digit numbers, "customers messaging from 10-digit numbers have all other carrier fees included in their pricing plan." On Enterprise, "Carrier pass through fees are billed separately based on exact usage." Registration is included rather than charged, in its words "EZ Texting plans include carrier registration at no extra cost", covering A2P 10DLC. The trial is published as a "14-Day Free Trial" with "No Credit Card Needed", described as all features and unlimited contacts, with no message limit stated.

That is a buyer able to model a year of cost before giving anyone an email address, which is why it ranks first on this page's stated criterion.

SimpleTexting is second, and it publishes the best explanation of what a credit is

Read at simpletexting.com/pricing on 21 October 2026, which reached the page through a 301 redirect to the http host, the credit arithmetic is the clearest in the category. "SMS is limited to 160 characters and costs 1 credit each." An extended message up to 306 characters "costs 2 credits". MMS "costs 3 credits each". Extra credits are 5.5 cents each. A local number adds 10 dollars a month plus a 4 dollar one time registration, and toll free numbers show "No additional fee" with activation time varying and carrier approval that "can take up to a week".

It is also the only vendor read today that publishes the carrier fee as a number and says what it does with it. Carriers "charge additional costs to send and receive messages", "these carrier fees amount to approximately $0.0025 per message in the United States", and "We never mark these up." That last sentence is a commitment a buyer can hold them to and nobody else on this page makes it.

Why it is second rather than first. Only one tier's price renders. The plan slider offers 500 to 50,000 or more texts and the page shows the price for 500 credits only, at 39 dollars a month, billed yearly at 398.40 dollars. Both of those figures appear together without the monthly billing price for any tier, so read them as a pair rather than taking the monthly figure as the monthly cost. A free trial exists, "Try It Free" with "No credit card required", with no stated length or message allowance, and a 30 day money back guarantee applies to paid plans.

Attentive and Klaviyo publish no SMS price at all, and that is the finding

Read at attentive.com/pricing on 21 October 2026, no dollar price and no per message rate appears anywhere. The FAQ says pricing "is tailored to your business needs based on your message volume, subscriber list size" and the plan cards say "Pricing based on list size and messages sent" and "Pricing based on volume and needs". It does describe billing shapes, with "Pay per click" for one AI product, "Flat monthly fee" for two others and "Pay per message and subscriber count" for the Text plan, and states "Attentive offers usage-based pricing, so you only pay for what you actually use." No contract term is stated.

Read at klaviyo.com/pricing the same day, no paid SMS price renders either. The only figure attached to messaging is on the free plan, "$5 of mobile messages/month", described as region and provider dependent, alongside "Up to 250 active profiles" and "500 email sends/month". Two cautions about that reading rather than conclusions from it: the page served to this fetch was the UK English pricing page while its calculator displayed a figure in US dollars, which is a reason to treat any price fetched from it as possibly local to the fetch, and the page contradicts itself on support, with the free plan highlights showing email support where the FAQ limits it to the first 60 days.

Neither of those is a criticism of either product, both of which are strong and both of which are the right answer for some stores. On this page's criterion they cannot be ranked above the two vendors that publish the sum, because a buyer cannot check them without a sales conversation.

The three questions the pricing page will not answer

How is consent captured and where does the record live. On this channel consent is the product and it is also the liability. A platform that cannot export the time, the source and the wording of each opt in is holding an asset you cannot move and a risk you cannot evidence.

What happens to your number if you switch. Registered numbers are not always portable. Ask before the first campaign, not at renewal.

Who handles a carrier filtering problem. Messages get filtered for content rather than for consent, and the vendor's willingness to work that through with the carrier is the difference between a day and a month.

The surface none of these platforms watches

Every platform on this page measures messages you send to people who already gave you a number. There is a step long before that, and it produces no deliverability report. A buyer asks an assistant which brands or suppliers are worth considering in your category and gets two or three names back in prose. No click, no visit, no subscriber. If you are not among them, the person never reaches the point of joining your list, and your SMS dashboard looks completely healthy.

AI Knows Us exists for that single row, and we are not an SMS platform. We send no messages, we hold no list and we handle no consent. We watch the buying questions your market asks across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and report which answers name you, which name a rival and which name nobody at all. The limits to judge us on are published rather than quoted on a call. At aiknowsus.com/pricing, read 23 October 2026, Growth at 299 dollars a month covers 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers across all five surfaces, Scale at 599 dollars covers 300 questions and 3,500 scheduled answers, and a Claude check costs 3 credits where most checks cost 1. SEO Start at 149 dollars renders zero buyer questions, zero credits and zero engines, so it does not do this job and the floor price is not the price of this work. The page also publishes a free scan, in its own words "Run a free scan on your own domain and read what the AI apps say about you today", with "No account needed".

Where a rival beats us, and it is the fact a procurement reviewer will care about most. Our rendered pricing text carries no SSO, no SOC 2, no ISO certification, no white label and no data processing agreement, checked on 21 October 2026. Vendors in our own category do publish some of those. If you are buying under a security review, that absence is the more important fact about us than anything else on this page.

Scope

This page is about choosing software you run. It deliberately does not target sms marketing companies, sms marketing agency, best sms marketing services, sms marketing vendors or online sms marketing services, all of which an existing page on this site already pools with a full treatment of the consent stack, and that is the page to read if you want people to run the channel for you rather than a platform to run it yourself. It also does not target sms marketing benefits or sms marketing apps for shopify, which are separate pages here.

What buyers ask

How much should I budget per message. On the published figures above, somewhere between 1 and 5.5 cents a credit depending on tier, plus roughly a quarter of a cent in US carrier fees, and a long message is two credits rather than one.

Toll free or a 10 digit local number. Local for a local business, toll free for national volume. Registration applies either way and the timeline is carrier controlled.

Can I run SMS and email on one platform. Yes, and for a store with one list it is usually the right call. The published comparison of that choice is on our email and SMS page.

If your list building problem is at the point of sale rather than online, our page on building the list at the table and automating five emails for restaurants. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,490 stored bodies (2,118 published drafts plus 372 fetched live pages) against 2,404 live pages, with my own wave excluded. 978 of those 2,404 pages, 40.7 percent, carry no inbound link from anywhere on the site, and that figure is an upper bound, because a body we cannot read cannot be counted as a linker.