SMS pricing is not a subscription price, and that single fact is why almost every article about TextMagic pricing is useless to you. What you actually pay is a platform or credit charge, plus a per-message rate that changes by destination country, plus a set of US number and registration charges that exist whether or not the vendor puts them on the page you land on first.
I run high-ticket dropshipping stores where a single order is worth $1,000 to $5,000. My SMS volume is tiny compared to a $30-AOV apparel store, and that flips the usual economics completely. A per-message rate that would destroy a store sending 200,000 promos a month is almost irrelevant to me. What matters is whether the freight carrier delivery window actually reaches the customer who has been waiting three weeks, and whether their reply lands somewhere a human sees it.
So I went through TextMagic’s own site properly. I pulled the sitemap, opened every page whose URL contained pricing, plan, cost, fee, rate, billing, SMS, 10DLC, compliance or carrier, then did the same on their support subdomain. Everything below was read on a TextMagic page in September 2026, and I link the exact page each figure sits on.
Here is what I found, in short. The pay-as-you-go rate is real and it is $0.049 per US message part. The number and registration charges add $20 a month before you send a single text. The character rule can triple your bill without you changing anything. And there is one price TextMagic does not publish on any public page at all, which I will name precisely rather than guess at.
Start texting customers without signing a contract
No monthly platform fee on the pay-as-you-go plan, US messages at $0.049 per 160-character part, inbound replies free, and unused credit that never expires. Your first number and your first 10DLC campaign month are both free.
The four things that make up a TextMagic bill
Before any numbers, get the shape right. A US business SMS bill from TextMagic has four separate parts, and only one of them is the thing people call “the price”.
First, the plan. TextMagic runs prepaid credit, not a seat subscription. Second, the per-message rate, charged per message part rather than per message you think you sent. Third, the number you send from, which is a monthly subscription of its own. Fourth, the US carrier registration line, which for a local number is another monthly charge on top of the number.
Miss any of the last three and your estimate will be wrong by more than the first one costs. That is the whole reason this article exists. If you want to follow along against your own destination country, open the TextMagic pricing calculator and set it to your volume while you read.
The plans: Essential and Professional
TextMagic’s billing guide on its support site names two plans and describes both. This is the page that actually explains the model, not the marketing pricing page.
Essential, the pay-as-you-go plan
Essential has no monthly platform fee. You buy prepaid credit and every service draws down that balance. The support site lists the credit bundle sizes as 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 or 10,000 in your account currency, and names those currencies as USD, EUR, AUD and GBP. That is ten bundle sizes, and I counted them on the page.
On credit expiry the same page is unambiguous about Essential. It says, verbatim, “Your unused credit will never expire.” The tradeoff it names is that on Essential you have to buy a virtual number separately for an extra monthly fee.
Professional, the monthly plan
Professional is the volume-discount plan. TextMagic says it is available in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and Australia, and that subscribers get discounted outbound message prices, one free virtual number, and one free Sender ID in the UK and Australia.
TextMagic does not publish the Professional plan prices on any public page. I want to be exact about that claim rather than hand-wave it, so here is what I opened. The TextMagic pricing page shows a country and volume calculator and a full pricing table, and neither contains a monthly plan price. The support billing article links to the plan prices, and that link goes to app.textmagic.com, which is the logged-in web app. I requested it and it returns a JavaScript shell with no price in the HTML at all. I also ran TextMagic’s own site search for subscription plan, monthly plan and pricing plans, and every result was a blog post.
The URLs I checked and found no monthly plan price on: /pricing/, /virtual-mobile-number/, /enterprise-sms/, /business-text-messaging/, /mass-texting/, /users/, /email-campaigns/, /10dlc-texting/, /toll-free-texting/, /sms-sender-id/, /bring-your-own-cpaas/, the support billing article, and five support billing FAQs. Following my own rule, a figure a reader cannot go and look at is not a published figure, so I am not printing a Professional price here. If you see one quoted confidently elsewhere, ask which public URL it came from.
That opacity matters more than it sounds. You cannot compare Professional against a competitor’s published plan without creating an account first, which is exactly the friction that makes people default to the pay-as-you-go rate and overpay.
The US per-message rate, and what one message means
This part TextMagic publishes clearly, and it is the same figure on the marketing pricing table and on the support copy of that table.
| Service | Published US price | Billing term |
|---|---|---|
| Outbound SMS | $0.049 per SMS (160 plain text characters) | Per message part, drawn from prepaid credit |
| Inbound SMS | Free | No charge |
| Outbound SMS via a connected CPaaS account | $0.01 per SMS, plus your provider’s own fees | Per message part |
| Outbound or inbound MMS | $0.08 per MMS | Per message, either direction |
Inbound is genuinely free on TextMagic’s own numbers, which is not universal and is worth real money on a two-way channel where you cannot predict reply volume. The one place that changes is the bring your own CPaaS page, which states, verbatim, “A flat rate of 1¢ will be applied for each message part sent or received through your CPaaS provider.” On BYOC, replies cost you a cent each.
The 70-character trap that triples campaigns
Here is the line that quietly decides your bill. TextMagic charges per message part, and it defines a part as 160 plain text characters or 70 Unicode characters. The pricing page spells out the consequence: “A message with 161 plain text characters will be counted as 2 texts.”
Seventy characters is the number to stare at. A message becomes Unicode the moment it contains anything outside the basic GSM set, and the two things that do it by accident are an emoji and a curly apostrophe. Type your notification in a word processor or a Mac notes app, let autocorrect turn a straight apostrophe into a typographic one, paste it in, and your 160-character allowance silently becomes 70. The Unicode Consortium’s own FAQ on UTF encodings explains why those characters need the wider encoding in the first place.
Work it through on a real message. “Your fireplace ships Thursday, and the freight carrier will call you to book a 4-hour delivery window. Reply here if that day does not work.” That is about 140 characters. As plain text it is one part and costs $0.049. Put one curly apostrophe or one emoji in it and, at TextMagic’s published 70 characters per Unicode part, that message needs three parts. The same message now costs $0.147. You changed nothing a customer would notice and tripled the send cost.
TextMagic also caps length. The pricing page states the maximum message length as 918 standard or 412 Unicode characters. And on failures, the billing FAQ is blunt: “You are charged for every SMS or email sent, regardless of whether it is delivered.” Messages rejected before sending, for unsubscribed contacts or invalid details, are free.
A2P 10DLC: the surprise cost, except TextMagic absorbs half of it
In the United States, application-to-person messaging from a local 10-digit number has to be registered with The Campaign Registry before carriers will reliably deliver it. This is where the hidden fees usually live, because most platforms pass through a brand registration fee, a campaign registration fee and a monthly carrier charge. The Campaign Registry’s own resources section is the primary source on how the registration framework works.
TextMagic’s position here is genuinely better than most and it is published in two places. The 10DLC texting page FAQ says, verbatim, “Textmagic will cover all one-time costs for your 10DLC brand + campaign vetting.” The support registration guide repeats it and adds the recurring side: the first month is free, after which you pay $10 monthly for the 10DLC campaign renewal plus the texting number fee of $10 per month.
So the answer to “what are the A2P 10DLC fees at TextMagic” is that the brand registration fee and the campaign registration fee are absorbed by TextMagic, and what you carry is a $10 per month campaign renewal. That is a real, checkable, published answer, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. If registration fees are what has been blocking you from turning SMS on, start the free TextMagic trial and get the brand vetting moving, because the queue is the slow part, not the setup.
Two caveats I would want if I were you. TextMagic states plainly that “Textmagic does not support transfers of 10DLC registrations from other suppliers”, so if you already registered elsewhere you start again. And the support guide adds that a sole proprietor without an EIN should use toll-free texting instead, because 10DLC brand registration wants a tax ID.
The approval time contradicts itself on their own site
Worth flagging because it affects your launch date. The 10DLC page FAQ says it usually takes up to 7 business days to get your brand and campaign approved. The support registration guide for the same process says 10 business days, and repeats it as 10 days in the body. Those are two different numbers on two pages of one company’s own site, so plan against the longer one.
Toll-free is the cheaper compliance route
If you do not need a local area code, toll-free is cheaper on this axis. The toll-free texting page answers the cost question with “Verification is free.” and puts the timeline at roughly 2 to 5 business days. Toll-free skips the $10 monthly 10DLC campaign renewal entirely. You still pay $10 a month for the number.
Worried the carrier fees will show up later anyway?
SimpleTexting publishes a per-carrier surcharge schedule with a rate for each network, from $0.0015 to $0.0060 per toll-free SMS, and states it passes them through with no markup. If you want the carrier line itemized before you commit, that is the transparent option.
Numbers, Sender IDs and the rest of the monthly line items
Every one of these is drawn from your prepaid balance, not billed to your card, which is a detail that catches people out. TextMagic’s billing FAQ warns that if your balance is too low to renew a number, it reserves the right to cancel that number permanently.
| Line item | Published price | Term |
|---|---|---|
| Local or toll-free texting number, US or Canada | $10 per number per month | Monthly, first month free |
| 10DLC campaign registration | $10 per campaign per month | Monthly, first month free, initial registration free |
| Alphanumeric Sender ID | $10 per campaign per month | Monthly, first month free, approval up to 14 days |
| Carrier lookup | $0.04 per lookup | Per use |
| Email lookup | $0.04 per lookup | Per use |
| Outbound voice calls | $0.041 per minute | Per minute |
| Inbound voice calls | $0.023 per minute | Per minute |
| Voice call forwarding | $0.041 per minute | Per minute |
| Users, SSO, live chat, helpdesk tickets, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram | Free | Included |
That last row deserves a sentence of its own, because it is where TextMagic is unusually generous and where a lot of older write-ups are now wrong. The TextMagic users page states, verbatim, “Adding users to your team is completely free.” Unlimited users, shared balance, SSO included. If you have read somewhere that TextMagic hides per-seat pricing behind a sales call, check the live page.
Note also that a Sender ID is outbound only. TextMagic’s pricing table says recipients cannot reply to texts sent from a Sender ID, which rules it out for the two-way use cases that matter most to a high-ticket store. In the US you are on a number anyway.
Do credits expire, and can you get your money back
On Essential, no. Unused credit never expires and TextMagic says so directly. On Professional, unused credits roll over and stay active for up to two months from purchase, and TextMagic gives its own worked example: credit bought on 15 January expires on 1 March, credit bought on 1 March expires on 1 May.
Then there is the trap nobody mentions. If you upgrade from Essential to Professional, your never-expiring balance stops never-expiring. TextMagic’s billing page says, verbatim, “Your remaining balance will be added to the Professional monthly billing plan and expire if not used before the end of the following month.” Downgrading the other way is safe: the page says a balance carried back to Essential stays on your account.
Refunds exist. The support billing FAQ says you can request a refund for any unused credit by contacting them with your name, company name, email address and the reason. That is a request process, not an automatic button, so treat large prepayments accordingly.
Email, where TextMagic publishes three different prices
I only flag this because I promised to publish what the vendor publishes rather than tidy it up. TextMagic’s email rate appears three ways on pages I read in this session.
The full pricing table lists outbound emails at $0.006 per email. The calculator on the same pricing page says that after your free credits the rate is $0.003 per email, and the volume selector immediately above it prices every tier from 20,000 to 500,000 emails at $0.001 per email. The pricing page FAQ then says the cost of sending one email is 0.003 in USD, GBP or EUR, and 0.005 in AUD.
The first 10,000 emails are free after domain verification, and that part is consistent everywhere. But if email volume is part of why you are choosing TextMagic, get the rate confirmed in writing before you commit, because their own page gives you three answers. For context on the compliance side of bulk email, the FTC’s CAN-SPAM compliance guide for business is the primary US source.
What 400 notifications a month actually costs
Now the number you cannot get from the pricing page. Take a realistic high-ticket store: 400 order and shipping notifications a month, US customers, sending from a TextMagic number. Here is the bill four ways, because the character rule genuinely moves it this much.
| Scenario | Message parts | Message cost | Number | 10DLC campaign | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toll-free number, messages under 160 plain characters | 400 | $19.60 | $10.00 | Not applicable | $29.60 |
| Local 10DLC number, messages under 160 plain characters | 400 | $19.60 | $10.00 | $10.00 | $39.60 |
| Local 10DLC number, messages of 161 to 320 plain characters | 800 | $39.20 | $10.00 | $10.00 | $59.20 |
| Local 10DLC number, 140-character messages containing one emoji or curly apostrophe | 1,200 | $58.80 | $10.00 | $10.00 | $78.80 |
Check my arithmetic, because you should. 400 parts at $0.049 is $19.60. 800 parts is $39.20. 1,200 parts is $58.80. The number is $10 a month and the 10DLC campaign renewal is another $10 a month, both after a free first month.
The headline is the spread. Someone budgeting this by multiplying 400 by 4.9 cents lands on $19.60. The realistic worst case on the same 400 notifications is $78.80, which is four times that estimate, and none of the difference comes from sending more messages. It comes from a punctuation character and a choice of number type.
The good news for a store like mine is that even $78.80 a month is nothing against the orders it protects. If two-way SMS saves one $3,000 freight delivery from failing because the customer was out, the channel paid for itself for six years. That is the actual high-ticket calculation, and it is completely different from the one an apparel store runs.
Month one is cheaper than all of these, because both the number and the 10DLC campaign are free for the first month. Do not budget from month one, but do use it: claiming the free number month costs nothing and lets you test delivery to your own phone before you commit credit.
When you should not buy TextMagic at all
This costs me commission to write, so take it seriously.
If you are sending fewer than 100 messages a month and your store already runs a helpdesk or an ecommerce platform with SMS built in, use that instead. Shopify, Gorgias, Klaviyo and most modern helpdesks will send a shipping notification without you adding a separate vendor, a separate login and a separate $20 a month of number and registration fees. At 100 messages a month TextMagic’s fixed costs are larger than its message costs, and paying $20 in overhead to send $4.90 of texts is a bad trade no matter how good the interface is.
If you are sending genuinely high volume and already run Twilio, Vonage, Sinch or Bandwidth, TextMagic’s BYOC route at $0.01 per part on top of your provider’s rate is the interesting product, not the $0.049 retail rate. Their own pricing page is explicit that the 1 cent price applies only to texts sent from connected CPaaS provider numbers.
And if you send internationally from your own numbers, read the limitation before you buy. TextMagic’s pricing FAQ says its virtual numbers support local messaging only and cannot be used to send texts internationally, and recommends BYOC for international texting. Their numbers also cannot be used for two-factor authentication or one-time passcodes, which the same FAQ states directly.
My verdict on TextMagic pricing in 2026
TextMagic’s pricing is more honest than most of this category, with one real hole in it.
What is good: the per-message rate is published, the number and registration fees are published, inbound is free, unlimited users are free, and the brand and campaign registration costs that competitors quietly pass through are absorbed. For a store that wants two-way texting without a contract, that is a clean offer, and the prepaid model means you cannot accidentally run up a bill.
What is not: the Professional monthly plan prices are invisible until you create an account, the email rate appears three different ways on one page, and the 10DLC approval time is stated as both 7 and 10 business days on the same company’s own pages. None of those are dealbreakers. All of them mean you should confirm your specific numbers inside the account before you build a budget around them.
For the high-ticket store owner specifically, my read is this. Your volume is low, so per-message rate is close to irrelevant and the $20 a month of fixed US overhead is the number that decides it. If SMS is going to carry delivery-window coordination and quote follow-up for orders worth thousands, $30 to $80 a month is trivially worth it. If it is going to send four texts a month, use what is already in your stack and revisit this when volume justifies a dedicated tool.
One last thing on the compliance side. Nothing here is legal advice, US messaging rules vary and change, and consent requirements under the TCPA and CAN-SPAM are your responsibility rather than your vendor’s. TextMagic says as much itself: it acts as a service platform provider, and you are responsible for lawful use. Get your opt-in flow right before you send anything.
Not sure SMS is the gap in your store at all?
A $30 to $80 a month notification tool will not fix a store that is not converting $1,000 to $5,000 orders yet. If you are still building, the build itself is the priority, and we do that part with you end to end.
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- TextMagic Review 2026: The Best Business SMS Platform for Ecommerce?
- SimpleTexting Review 2026: Is It the Best SMS Marketing Platform for Ecommerce?
- How to Get a Business Phone Number Suppliers Will Accept
- LiveChat Pricing 2026: The $19 Plan Allows One Person
- Business Formation for High-Ticket Dropshipping
- How to Find Suppliers for High-Ticket Dropshipping Products
More guides, tools and teardowns for high-ticket operators are at Ecommerce Paradise.
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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