10DLC registration is mandatory — but the billing mechanic is a vendor choice, and six handle it four different ways

If you send application-to-person SMS from a US 10-digit long code, the carriers require your business to register a brand and at least one campaign through The Campaign Registry. That cost is real and unavoidable. What is not fixed is the mechanic — whether your vendor itemizes the registration as a separate line, converts it into a flat recurring charge, absorbs it into the unit price, or rolls it into a generic carrier pass-through. This guide is only about that registration mechanic: how the same mandatory Campaign Registry fee shows up (or doesn’t) on six vendors’ pages. For the smallest senders, the mechanic is the difference between a true cost and a marketing headline.

The registration mechanic, side by side

Vendor	Brand fee	Campaign fee	How registration is billed
Salesmsg	$4.50 one-time	$1.50–$10/mo	Itemized brand + campaign line
Heymarket	—	$10/mo per campaign	Flat monthly, on top of seat price
Textline	—	$15/mo	Flat monthly, on top of plan
SimpleTexting	—	—	Generic ~$0.0025/msg carrier pass-through
Text-Em-All	absorbed	absorbed	”No fees for registration”
Textla	absorbed	absorbed	Folded into $0.01/SMS

These are the six vendors in our dataset that state a carrier/registration position on their public pages — three name a discrete 10DLC line (Salesmsg, Heymarket, Textline), one quotes a generic per-message carrier pass-through (SimpleTexting), and two say registration is absorbed (Text-Em-All, Textla). EZ Texting and Textedly publish flat telecom surcharges ($5/mo Launch and $8/mo respectively) but do not break out 10DLC registration as its own line, so they sit outside this comparison. Every other vendor in the dataset either leaves carrier registration unstated or routes its base price to sales.

Itemized: you see the brand and campaign line

Salesmsg is the only vendor here that itemizes registration as a discrete brand-plus-campaign charge. Its pricing page lists a $4.50 one-time brand registration plus a $1.50–$10/mo campaign fee, billed separately from the $25/mo entry plan (500 credits). A solo user texting from one number pays the one-time $4.50 and lands at the low end of that campaign range, so registration adds only a couple of dollars a month to the bill. Among the three vendors that name a discrete 10DLC registration line (Salesmsg, Heymarket, Textline), Salesmsg’s is the smallest — and the only one with a one-time, rather than purely recurring, component. The two absorbed-fee vendors charge $0 for registration, and SimpleTexting’s generic ~$0.0025/msg pass-through is smaller still per message, so this is the cheapest itemized registration line, not the cheapest position overall.

Flat monthly: bundled into a recurring fee

Heymarket and Textline convert registration into a flat recurring charge. Heymarket lists $10/mo per campaign on top of its per-user pricing — and remember Heymarket bills $49/user/mo (Standard, annual) with a two-user minimum and meters SMS at $0.03/segment on top of that, so the $10 campaign fee is a small rider on an already seat-heavy bill. Textline lists $15/mo for 10DLC, the highest discrete registration line of any vendor in this dataset, layered onto an Essentials plan structured as 3 agents + 600 credits (the base price itself is quote-gated). Neither vendor is hiding the fee, but it’s a permanent monthly line, not a one-time charge — so over a year Textline’s $15/mo registration alone is $180, versus Salesmsg’s one-time $4.50 brand plus a campaign fee that, even pinned at the $10/mo ceiling, tops out near $124.50 in year one.

Absorbed: the “free” headline that’s actually free — for some

Exactly two vendors in the dataset state that registration is absorbed rather than charged. Text-Em-All states plainly that there are “no added carrier surcharges or fees for users, numbers, or registration” — registration cost is simply not passed to the customer. Textla takes a different route to the same outcome: it folds carrier fees into its $0.01/SMS rate and markets “zero hidden fees,” so there is no separate registration charge at all on its $25/mo Starter plan (or its $19/mo annual rate).

This is where the headline gets misleading — in the other direction. Plenty of vendors advertise low entry prices without mentioning 10DLC, but registration still applies; it’s a carrier requirement, not a vendor option. SimpleTexting, for instance, notes a ~$0.0025/msg carrier pass-through in its plan detail — small per message, but real, and easy to miss against a $39 sticker. It is a generic carrier line, not a named 10DLC registration fee, which is why it sits in its own row above rather than with the absorbed pair. The genuinely registration-free vendors are only the two that say so explicitly. A “$19/mo” or “$25/mo” headline elsewhere — Quo’s $19 Starter, EZ Texting’s $25 Launch, Sakari’s $25 entry — is not the same thing as registration being free; none of those pages state that carrier registration is absorbed.

How to read this

For the smallest senders — one number, one campaign — the ranking on registration alone, among the six vendors that state a position, is clear: Text-Em-All and Textla cost nothing extra for registration; SimpleTexting adds only a fraction of a cent per message; Salesmsg costs a one-time $4.50 plus a low single-digit monthly; Heymarket adds $10/mo and Textline $15/mo on top of their plans. None of these vendors is wrong to charge — 10DLC is a real carrier cost that someone has to pay. The question a buyer should ask is not “is it free?” but “is it itemized, recurring, absorbed, or a per-message pass-through?” — because a flat $15/mo registration line on a low-volume account can quietly outweigh the plan it’s attached to, while an absorbed or per-message fee only looks free until your volume makes the markup the bigger number. That’s why we publish the fee, the mechanic, and the source behind every figure rather than the headline.