Guide · Business Texting
Two business texting plans drop the per-text meter — and both start at $19 a month
Almost every business-texting plan bundles a fixed message allowance and meters every text past it. In our dataset two vendors escape that meter at the same $19 entry price — Quo, with per-seat unlimited US/CA texts and calls, and Text-Em-All, priced by audience size with no per-message cost — and they answer the question in two different ways.
Yes — and there are two ways to do it, both of which happen to start at the same price. Across the priced vendors in our dataset, two plans let you send texts without a per-message meter ticking behind them, and both enter at $19/mo:
- Quo (formerly OpenPhone) sells texting as a flat per-seat subscription. Its Starter plan is $19/user/mo ($15/user/mo on annual, about 21% off) and includes unlimited texts and calls to the US and Canada on one number per seat — no bundled credit allowance to run through, so nothing to meter for standard volume.
- Text-Em-All removes the meter a different way. Its Monthly plan is priced by contact-group size — from $19/mo for a small audience, scaling up as your contact list grows — with no per-message cost for messaging the same groups. You pay for the size of your audience, not for each text you send to it.
So the exclusivity claim cuts the other way from what you might expect: it is not “only one vendor,” but it is also not “everyone.” Most priced vendors here do meter, and only these two escape it — by charging per seat (Quo) or per audience (Text-Em-All) instead of per message.
That matters because the dominant billing model in business texting is hybrid: a flat base that includes a fixed credit allowance — roughly one credit per 160-character SMS segment — then an overage rate per credit after that. It looks like a flat plan until the month you send more than you expected.
What “unlimited” actually replaces
Here is what the meter looks like on the cheapest entry plan from each vendor, alongside the rate you pay once you run through the bundle. The top two rows are the no-per-message-meter plans; everything below them charges by the message in one form or another.
| Vendor | Entry plan | Included | Per-message charge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quo | Starter $19/user/mo | Unlimited US/CA texts + calls | None (per seat) |
| Text-Em-All | Monthly from $19/mo | Messaging to a contact group sized to your list | None on the monthly plan for the same groups (priced by audience) |
| Salesmsg | 500 Messages $25/mo | 500 credits | ~4.0 cents/credit overage |
| SimpleTexting | 500 Credits $39/mo | 500 credits | 5.5 cents/credit overage |
| Heymarket | Standard $49/user/mo (annual) | None bundled | $0.03/segment metered |
| Avochato | Pay-as-You-Go $0 base | None bundled | $0.08/segment metered |
The arithmetic is the whole story for the metered plans. On SimpleTexting’s $39 plan you get 500 credits, then every credit beyond that bills at 5.5 cents — so a heavier month layers a per-text charge on top of the base. On Salesmsg’s $25 plan it is the same shape: 500 credits, then about 4.0 cents each. Avochato’s $0-base Pay-as-You-Go is pure metering at $0.08/segment, with no subscription cushion at all — every text is a line item. By contrast, on Quo’s Starter a heavy month and a light month cost the same $19, and on Text-Em-All’s Monthly plan a busy week of blasts to your existing groups doesn’t add a per-text charge either.
The competitor worth pausing on among the metered options is Salesmsg, because it does something Quo does: it bundles calling on the same number you text from, and includes one free local or toll-free number and one seat at $25/mo. But it still meters texts — 500 credits, then ~4.0 cents each — so it is a cheaper metered line, not an unlimited one. That’s the line the table draws between its top two rows and the rest.
What you trade for no meter
Each of the two no-meter plans asks you to pay along a different axis, and that is the real choice.
Quo’s $19 is per user — that is the axis you scale on. It is the same billing shape as Heymarket ($49/user/mo on annual, two-user minimum) — except Heymarket layers a metered $0.03/segment charge on top of the seat, so its per-user price is a floor, not a ceiling. Quo’s per-user price is the ceiling: add seats, not surprises. Extra numbers are +$5/mo each. For a single-line shop the comparison is starkest — $19 flat against a $25–$49 base that still has a meter running underneath it.
Text-Em-All’s $19 is per audience size — you scale on the size of your contact list, not on seats and not on message count. That makes it the cleaner fit when one or two people blast the same audience often (reminders, alerts, notifications), and a worse fit for a multi-seat team holding lots of separate two-way conversations, which is exactly where Quo’s per-seat model shines. Same headline price, opposite scaling axis.
Where unlimited stops being the right question
Escaping the meter only wins if you send enough to blow past a bundle. A business firing off a few hundred reminder texts a month may never touch SimpleTexting’s 500-credit ceiling, in which case its $39 (with three seats included) buys marketing tooling — segmented campaigns, contact management — that a phone-and-inbox product like Quo isn’t built to replace. And true high-volume blast senders are a different category again: Avochato’s $210/mo Standard plan exists precisely to drop the per-segment rate from $0.08 to $0.03 once you’re past roughly 2,000 segments a month, which is a volume-discount play, not a no-meter one.
So the buyer’s question splits cleanly into two answers, both priced at $19 to start. If you run two-way conversations — replies, missed-call follow-ups, appointment back-and-forth — where volume is unpredictable and a meter is a liability, Quo at $19/user/mo takes the per-text meter off the table while keeping calling on the same number; you scale by adding seats. If you instead run one-to-many broadcasts to a steady list — reminders, alerts, notifications — Text-Em-All’s Monthly plan from $19/mo takes the meter off too, charging by how big your audience is rather than by how many texts you send it. And if you send predictable, bundleable volume and want campaign tooling, a metered credit plan like SimpleTexting’s $39 may still cost less in practice. The point is that “no per-text meter” is real here, but it is not a single product — it is two, split by whether you are holding conversations or sending broadcasts, so don’t read anyone else’s “from $19” as automatically the same deal.