10DLC registration cost calculator

10DLC is the carriers' registration system for business texts sent from ordinary ten-digit numbers. You register a brand (your business, one per tax ID) and one campaign per use case with The Campaign Registry through your texting provider (see what 10DLC is). The Campaign Registry publishes no public fee schedule; the fees reach you through that provider, and each one sets its own pass-through. So the honest answer to “what does 10DLC registration cost” is a provider's published fee page, which is what the calculator loads.

A 10DLC bill has three layers, and the calculator adds all three:

• One-time fees: brand registration, optional third-party brand vetting (it raises your throughput tier), and a vetting fee per campaign.
• Monthly fees: a fee per campaign, set by use case. A standard campaign is $10.00 a month on Twilio's page and $20.00 on Bandwidth's, and some providers bill the first months up front.
• Per-message carrier fees: each carrier charges for every outbound SMS segment on registered 10DLC traffic. In Twilio's words, “AT&T charges $0.0035 for outbound SMS, while T-Mobile charges $0.0045”, and “Twilio passes the fees through”. Your carrier mix sets the blended rate.

How to use it:

1. Pick the provider you send through, or the one you are pricing. Its published fees fill the fee fields.
2. Enter brands, campaigns and the months you are budgeting. If you are still choosing a campaign type, the 10DLC registration checklist walks the decision.
3. Enter monthly segments, not messages: a long text is several segments (the SMS segment counter shows how many), and set your carrier split if your delivery reports show it. The default is an even split across the three big carriers.
4. Overwrite any fee your contract or invoice shows differently. The record says the basis was edited.

Pick the campaign type your volume actually needs. A low volume mixed campaign costs $1.50 a month on the Twilio, Telnyx, Plivo and Vonage pages, against $10 for a standard one; Twilio's page caps it at 2,000 segments a day toward T-Mobile. Never pick a type for its price, though. Telnyx's fee page says it plainly: “DO NOT declare a false Use Case to achieve lower charges or higher throughput.”

Get the campaign right the first time. Telnyx and Vonage charge the $15 review fee again each time a campaign goes back for changes. The CTIA messaging guidelines are the carrier-side rulebook behind that review, and the SMS privacy policy generator drafts the policy a campaign links to.

Keep a number on every live campaign. Bandwidth passes through a T-Mobile non-use fee of $250 per campaign when a campaign has no phone number attached for a rolling 60 days. Delete campaigns you no longer use, and budget for the tail: on Vonage's page a cancelled campaign stays active to the end of the period paid for, with no refund, and Bandwidth charges the first three months even if you cancel sooner.

Compare the whole bill, not the registration line. On the figures above, past a few thousand segments a month the carrier fees and the provider's own message rate outweigh every registration fee. The Twilio SMS pricing guide breaks one bill down line by line, and Twilio alternatives and the SMS API provider comparison read how other providers handle registration. If 10DLC does not fit your traffic at all, see 10DLC vs toll-free vs short code.

Every fee in the calculator and on this page, with the page it came from and the date it was read. Fee pages change without notice, and your contract can differ from the published list: the record names its basis so you can check it against your invoice. This is a budgeting aid, not legal or billing advice.