Can SMS marketing be free?
Texting one customer from your own phone rides on your phone plan. That is a conversation, one person at a time, from a number your carrier already gave you.
A campaign is a different thing. You are sending business traffic, in volume, from a number the carriers expect to be registered. That has a price.
What the bill is
Entrance bills three things, spelled out on the pricing page and in how billing works:
- Segments, at the tier your monthly volume reaches. The rate is 1.85¢, 1.65¢, 1.45¢, or 1.25¢.
- An account fee for that tier, billed with usage.
- $1 a month for each number.
Carrier fees are included in the segment rate. There is no second carrier line to discover later. There is also no Entrance plan where the campaign itself is free. Setup is included. Adding a person to the workspace has no separate fee.
One text can be more than one segment. An emoji is enough to do it. The segment note is how to see that before the invoice does.
What people mean by free
They usually mean one of three workarounds: texting by hand, an email-to-text gateway a carrier used to run, or a tool that postpones the bill. Hand texting does not become a campaign when the list gets long, and it still needs consent. Gateways that turn email into texts are not a business program, and they are a common way to send traffic the carriers filter. A tool that advertises a free account still has to pay the carriers once you send real volume, and regular sending still waits on 10DLC.
If the list is small enough that you can text it yourself, do that until the replies are more than one person can hold. When you move it into Entrance, the pricing page is the cost, and the first send should be a test to your own phone.