Guide · Business Texting
Unused texting credits: Text-Em-All's never expire, Sakari holds 90 days, and most rivals give you one cycle
A spiky sender who under-uses one month keeps far more paid value on some vendors than others — the published rollover windows in this dataset run from 'never' down to nothing at all.
Business texting sells you a block of message credits each month — one credit is roughly one 160-character SMS segment — and the fine-print question that decides how much of that block you actually keep is what happens to the leftovers. In this dataset the answer is anything but uniform. Text-Em-All’s pay-as-you-go credits never expire. Sakari carries unused credits for 90 days. EZ Texting rolls them 60 days. SlickText gives you a single billing cycle — one month — and SimpleTexting states that credits roll over but publishes no window at all. The two remaining bundled-credit vendors here, Textedly and Salesmsg, say nothing about rollover on their pricing pages, which for an uneven sender is the least forgiving outcome of the lot.
| Vendor | Plan cited | Published rollover window |
|---|---|---|
| Text-Em-All | Credits (pay-as-you-go), $0 base | Never expire |
| Sakari | Starter, $25/mo | 90 days |
| EZ Texting | Launch, $25/mo (500 credits) | 60 days |
| SlickText | Starter, $29/mo (500 credits) | 1 month (single cycle) |
| SimpleTexting | 500 Credits, $39/mo | Rolls over — no window published |
Why the window matters for a spiky sender
If you send the same volume every month, rollover is academic — you consume the allowance and reset. It bites when your sends are lumpy: a seasonal promotion, an event push, a slow quarter. Take SlickText’s Starter plan, $29 for 500 credits. That works out to 5.8 cents per credit ($29 ÷ 500). Under-use it by 300 credits in a quiet month and, because rollover is one cycle, roughly $17.40 of paid value (300 × $0.058) evaporates if the following month is quiet too. On Sakari those same credits would still be alive at 90 days; on Text-Em-All they would still be alive next year.
Text-Em-All is the outlier by design
Text-Em-All is the only vendor here whose credits carry no expiry. Its pay-as-you-go credits start at 9 cents each (400-credit block) and scale down toward roughly 5 cents at volume, on a $0 base — you buy a balance and draw it down whenever, with a free Starter tier granting 25 test credits. That structure is a natural hedge for irregular senders: there is no monthly clock to beat. (Its alternative Monthly plan, from $19, is priced by contact-group size rather than a credit count, so rollover doesn’t apply there at all.) If preserving paid value through dead months is the priority, this is the model built for it.
Sakari and EZ Texting: the long fixed windows
Sakari publishes the longest fixed carry — 90 days — on a plan that starts at $25/mo (scaling up its slider toward $495 by segment volume), bundles a free dedicated number, and includes unlimited users. Three months of slack is enough to absorb most seasonal swings without losing anything. EZ Texting’s Launch plan ($25/mo, 500 credits) rolls credits 60 days, the next-longest defined window — though note Launch alone also carries a $5/mo telecom fee, and on EZ Texting three credits equal one MMS, so a picture-heavy sender burns the balance faster than the headline count suggests.
SlickText vs. SimpleTexting: single cycle, and an unpublished one
SlickText’s one-month rollover is clean and clearly stated: leftovers survive exactly one cycle, then reset. SimpleTexting is the ambiguous case. Its page confirms credits “roll over” — with extra credits billed at 5.5 cents each beyond the 500 bundled in its $39/mo entry plan — but does not state how long the carried balance lasts. That silence is worth a direct question to sales before you count on it, because “rolls over” without a window is not the same promise as Sakari’s explicit 90 days.
What to actually do
Match the window to your send pattern, not to the sticker price. A steady sender can ignore rollover entirely and shop on base cost. A spiky or seasonal sender should treat the window as a real line item: on a one-cycle plan like SlickText, an under-used month is money you don’t get back, whereas Sakari’s 90 days or Text-Em-All’s no-expiry credits quietly preserve it. And read “credits roll over” literally — SimpleTexting says it, but until the vendor names a duration, assume the shortest plausible one.