Pricing and Credits: Deciphering Your SMS Gateway Provider’s Service Fee

What’s a fair price to pay for access to an SMS Gateway Provider? Why do I need to pay for a monthly subscription?

And what are you actually paying for anyway?

These are common questions if you’re new to SMS/text message marketing… and hey, maybe they are even if you’re not. Either way, we’re going to do our best to answer them for you, so hang tight.

SMS Gateway Providers: What are You Paying For?

While every service is slightly different, a Local Text Marketers’ monthly subscription fee is applied towards 3 things…

1. The rental of a long code. Long codes are used to faciliate the transmission of texts messages via the mobile carriers (Bell, Virgin, At&T, etc.) and incur ongoing monthly lease fees.
2. A monthly allotment of “texts” or credits which can be used to send messages to your contacts. Most services sell packages that include a certain number of credits (on our service, we call these credits “texts” for simplicity’s sake. 200 “texts” allows you to send 1 text message to 200 hundred people, for instance). There is a “real” cost to send text messages via the carrier networks, so as new ones are added to your account monthly, new charges must be assessed.
3. A monthly system access fee. Running a text marketing service isn’t a “set it and forget” endeavor. There are ongoing software updates and upgrades, hosting costs, personnel costs and so on.

What’s with the Monthly Subscription?

Most services – like ours – operate on a monthly subscription basis. The reason why is simple; SMS Gateway Providers incur ongoing costs, and your account requires ongoing resources (text credits, long code rentals, etc.).

Accordingly, your account incurs ongoing costs. An ongoing subscription -whether it recurs monthly, bi-annually, or annually – is the only way to manage this.

Tell me about Pricing; What’s a Fair Price to Pay?

This is a difficult question to answser because price should only ever be one of the factors you use to make the purchasing decision for your text marketing gateway.

Value is a much more important criteria.

Think about this…

Does it make more sense to spend $100 / month on a service that brings you a 400% return on investment?

Or $25 / month on a service that brings you no return on investment?

Obviously, it’s the former; $100/month.

Does it make sense to pay $25 / month for a service that has few features and is complex and complicated to use?

Or is it more sensible to spend a little more for a rich set of features, and an easy intuitive interface?

Provided you put a dollar value on your time, I’d guess for most people it’s the latter.

Of course, you never want to pay more than a fair price, but what’s fair is dependent on so many factors it’s impossible to provide even “ball park” figures.

Where the Rubber Hits the Road: Test the Service for Yourself

The only way to assess the value of a SMS Gateway Provider is to try it.

We welcome you to try our two week free trial for yourself – no credit card is required to siqn up, and you’ll have access to our full suite of tools and 50 text messages to experiment with!

What are you waiting for?

Click here to try the free trial now!