Guide · Business Texting
The cheapest business texting plan at 500 texts a month is the one with no surcharge
Two vendors tie at a $25 sticker for a 500-credit plan — but only one of them stays $25 once the telecom line item lands.
If you send roughly 500 texts a month, you are shopping the entry tier of every business-texting vendor — the plans named after the exact number you need. Five of them publish a 500-credit bundle, and on sticker price the race looks like a tie at the bottom: EZ Texting’s Launch and Salesmsg’s 500 Messages plan are both $25/mo. The next two, Textedly Basic and SlickText Starter, sit at $29, with SimpleTexting’s 500 Credits plan at $39.
But two of those five carry a mandatory telecom line item that isn’t in the headline, and it reorders the whole list. Here is what 500 texts actually costs once you read past the sticker.
| Vendor | Plan | Sticker | Mandatory add-on | True monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salesmsg | 500 Messages | $25 | none | $25 |
| EZ Texting | Launch | $25 | $5/mo Telecom Fee | $30 |
| Textedly | Basic | $29 | $8/mo surcharge | $37 |
| SlickText | Starter | $29 | none stated | $29 |
| SimpleTexting | 500 Credits | $39 | none | $39 |
The tie breaks on a surcharge
EZ Texting and Salesmsg both ask $25 for 500 monthly credits. The difference is one footnote. EZ Texting applies a $5/mo Telecom Fee on the Launch plan only — it’s waived on the higher Boost and Scale tiers, but those are $75 and $125 for the same 500 credits, so trading up to escape the fee makes no sense at this volume. That fee turns Launch’s real cost into $30/mo.
Salesmsg’s $25 carries no such surcharge. The plan bundles 500 credits, one free local or toll-free number, one seat, and — unusually — voice calling on that same number. So the clean answer to “cheapest at 500” is Salesmsg at $25/mo flat. It is the only vendor here whose entry sticker survives contact with the fine print.
The $29 plans aren’t equal either
SlickText Starter and Textedly Basic share a $29 sticker, but they’re $8 apart in reality. Textedly charges an $8/mo telecom surcharge on every paid plan, pushing Basic to a true $37/mo — within two dollars of SimpleTexting’s much larger-looking $39 sticker. SlickText’s Starter lists no equivalent mandatory fee, leaving it at a genuine $29, and it throws in unlimited contacts plus a one-month credit rollover.
That makes SlickText, not Textedly, the real value pick among the $29-class plans — and it slots Textedly into a strange spot: the second-most-expensive option on the board once the surcharge lands, despite the second-lowest sticker.
Watch the allowance, not just the price
One quirk of this category: “500 credits” is not “500 texts” if your messages run long. A credit covers a standard 160-character SMS; longer messages and MMS consume more than one. SimpleTexting and EZ Texting both spell this out — EZ Texting counts 3 credits per MMS — so a business sending picture messages or long copy will burn the allowance faster than the plan name implies, regardless of which vendor you pick.
Overage rates matter at the margins too. If you occasionally spill past 500, the cost of extra credits varies: Salesmsg meters additional credits at roughly 4.0 cents each, SimpleTexting at 5.5 cents, and Textedly sells overflow in 500-message blocks at $30. At a steady ~500/month none of these bite, but they decide which plan is cheapest the moment your volume creeps up — another reason the flat, no-surcharge $25 is the safest floor.
A note on what’s not here
Several well-known texting brands don’t appear in this comparison because they don’t publish a 500-message entry plan you can price honestly. Quo (formerly OpenPhone) starts at $19/user/mo with unlimited US/CA texts, but it’s a per-seat phone product with no 500-credit bundle — a different shape of purchase. Sakari opens at $25/mo on a volume slider that never names a 500-credit tier, and Textla runs $25/mo plus $0.01 per SMS with no bundled allowance at all. None of those is a like-for-like 500-credit plan, so none can claim the bundled-credit crown. Textline, TextUs, and Podium gate their entry pricing behind a sales form entirely.
How to read this
At 500 texts a month, the honest cheapest business-texting plan is Salesmsg at $25/mo — the only one of the five 500-credit bundles whose advertised price is also the price you pay. EZ Texting matches the $25 sticker but bills $30 after its Launch-only telecom fee; SlickText is the best of the $29 tier at a true $29; Textedly’s $29 becomes $37 with surcharge; and SimpleTexting rounds out the field at $39. The sticker tie was real. The bill was not.