The fees, plainly
What 10DLC costs and why
10DLC is how US carriers let businesses text from ordinary 10-digit local numbers. You register who you are (the brand) and what you'll send (the campaign), and carriers add a small fee to each message. Here's every fee, who charges it and where the published figures disagree.
What is A2P 10DLC registration?
Application-to-person (A2P) texting from a 10-digit long code (10DLC) has to be registered with The Campaign Registry before US carriers will deliver it at normal volumes. You register your brand (your business, identified by its EIN, or yourself as a sole proprietor) and one or more campaigns (each kind of message you'll send, with samples and how people opt in).
Unregistered traffic is filtered and charged more: Bandwidth lists unregistered fees of $0.01 to $0.012 per SMS, two to three times the registered rates. Registration is done through your messaging provider, which passes the registry's and carriers' fees on to you.
What does each fee pay for?
Brand registration ($4.50) checks your business identity. Secondary vetting ($41.50) is a deeper check by a third party that gives you a trust score; skipping it keeps you on low limits. Public for-profit companies must also pass Authentication+ ($12.50), an email check that the brand contact must answer within 7 days.
Each campaign gets a manual review ($15.00 per submission at most providers, charged again if you resubmit) and a monthly fee set by its use case. Many providers bill the first three months of campaign fees up front.
Carrier fees are charged per message segment (160 plain characters, or 70 with emoji) and differ by carrier and direction. They rose four times in 2026: T-Mobile in January, AT&T in April, and Verizon in May and again in October.
Sole proprietor, low volume or vetted: which should a team pick?
Sole proprietor registration is for people without an EIN. It's cheap but limited: one campaign, one number, about one message a second and 1,000 messages a day to T-Mobile.
A business that sends a few hundred texts a day can register without secondary vetting and use a low volume mixed campaign; T-Mobile caps it at 2,000 messages a day. A team that texts more, or uses several numbers for local presence, should pay for vetting: the trust score sets its daily cap, from 2,000 up to 200,000 a day at T-Mobile.
Leaving GoHighLevel: what changes?
HighLevel bundles registration for its LC Phone numbers: $22.50 for sole proprietor or low-volume registration and $64.00 for high-volume standard, with monthly campaign fees of up to $2.10 or $10.50 (a 5% markup on the base fee) and texting usage of $0.00747 per segment plus carrier fees, per its help center (October 2026). Those bundles add up to the same brand, vetting and campaign-review fees plus a $3 Fast Track fee.
Whatever platform you move to, your brand and campaign details are yours: keep your EIN, legal name, website, opt-in wording and sample messages ready, because the new provider's registration asks for the same information.
Where do the published fees disagree?
We record each source's figure and date rather than pick one silently. The estimator uses The Campaign Registry's own fee list for registry fees and the current Twilio and Bandwidth tables for carrier fees.
- Sole proprietor brand fee: TCR lists $4.00; Twilio and Telnyx list $4.50.
- Standard brand fee: TCR lists $4.50; Sinch's page (updated October 6, 2026) still says $4.
- Authentication+ billing: TCR charges $12.50 for a 'successful or failed' vet; Twilio says it charges only for retries.
- Campaign vetting fee: $15 at Twilio, Telnyx, Plivo, Vonage, Sinch and Bandwidth; $7.50 at SignalWire (plus $7.50 per resubmission after a failed vet).
- Charity campaign: TCR lists $3 a month; Vonage lists $5.
- Carrier tables showing older rates: Telnyx still shows T-Mobile at $0.003 and Verizon at $0.0045; Vonage's pricing page shows T-Mobile and AT&T at $0.003 and Verizon at $0.004. Bandwidth and Twilio show the current rates used here.
- HighLevel's carrier table: HighLevel lists a Verizon inbound SMS fee of $0.0070 and US Cellular inbound at $0.0100; Twilio shows no Verizon inbound fee and $0.0025 for US Cellular.
- T-Mobile unregistered fees: Bandwidth says $0.012 (SMS) and $0.021 (MMS); Vonage says $0.008 and $0.017.
- T-Mobile Special Business Review: Bandwidth says $500; Vonage and Telnyx say $5,000, currently waived.
- Sole proprietor daily limit: Twilio says 1,000 messages a day to T-Mobile; HighLevel lists 3,000 segments a day.
Texting from TopReach
TopReach includes two-way texting from the same local numbers your team calls from, with every message stored on the contact record, texting opt-out handling and text steps in smart-list follow-ups that wait for the lead's local calling window.
Carriers require 10DLC registration before texting from local numbers. TopReach's terms say registry and carrier fees, such as 10DLC brand and campaign fees and carrier surcharges, are passed on and shown in the app or on your invoice.
