Guide · Business Texting
HIPAA texting that will actually sign a BAA: only two vendors say it out loud
Seven business-texting vendors market HIPAA compliance, but only Avochato and Textline name a signed BAA — and a BAA, not a marketing badge, is what makes you compliant.
If you handle protected health information, the only sentence that matters is whether the vendor will sign a Business Associate Agreement. A “HIPAA-compliant” badge on a pricing page is not a BAA, and without the signed contract you carry the liability yourself. So we read the public pages of every business-texting vendor in our dataset and split them on one question: who actually names a BAA?
Seven vendors market HIPAA — SimpleTexting, SlickText, Heymarket, Quo, Text Request, Avochato, and Textline. Only two state that a BAA is available: Avochato and Textline. The other five advertise HIPAA-compliant texting but leave the BAA unstated on the page, which for a covered entity is the difference between a vendor you can onboard and one you have to interrogate first.
The two that will sign
Avochato is the only HIPAA vendor here that publishes real, end-to-end pricing alongside its BAA. Its BAA rides on the quote-only Custom (Premium) tier, but the platform economics are public: a Pay-as-You-Go plan at $0 base + $0.08 per segment (5 users included, +$42/mo each), or a Standard plan at $210/mo that drops the rate to $0.03 per segment. Those two published rates cross at a clean, checkable point — $0.08 and $0.03 differ by $0.05, and $210 ÷ $0.05 = 4,200 segments/mo, above which the $210 base pays for itself. At 4,200 segments both plans cost $336 (Pay-as-You-Go: 4,200 × $0.08 = $336; Standard: $210 + 4,200 × $0.03 = $336).
Textline is the category’s dedicated HIPAA shared-inbox brand and explicitly offers BAAs (for an additional fee), but it quote-gates the monthly base price. What the live page does publish is the shape: Essentials = 3 agents + 600 message credits/mo (+$50/agent), Pro = 5 agents + 2,000 credits/mo (+$70/agent), with per-credit overage of $0.03 (add-on) or $0.04 (backup), $15/mo for 10DLC, and 20% off annual. We don’t record a base price because Textline doesn’t publish one — but the BAA is real.
| Vendor | HIPAA | BAA named | Published economics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avochato | Yes | Yes (Custom tier) | $0 + $0.08/seg, or $210/mo + $0.03/seg |
| Textline | Yes | Yes (added fee) | Base quote-gated; 600 / 2,000 credits, +$0.03/credit |
| Heymarket | Yes | Unstated | $49–$199/user/mo, min 2 users, $0.03/seg |
| SimpleTexting | Yes | Unstated | $39/500 cr to $119/3,000 cr |
| SlickText | Yes | Unstated | $29/500 cr to $129/3,500 cr |
| Quo | Yes | Unstated | $19–$47/user/mo, unlimited US/CA texts |
| Text Request | Yes | Unstated | HIPAA is a +$50/mo add-on; base quote-only |
The five that market HIPAA but go quiet on the BAA
These vendors say HIPAA and stop. Text Request is the most explicit and the most telling: HIPAA isn’t bundled, it’s a +$50/mo add-on, yet the page still doesn’t detail BAA terms (and the base plan is quote-only). Heymarket lists SOC 2 Type 2 plus HIPAA enablement across its per-user tiers — $49, $99, and $199 per user/mo billed annually, minimum 2 users, so the real Standard floor is $98/mo for two seats — with SMS metered at $0.03/segment on top; the BAA is simply not named. Quo lists “HIPAA ready” as a cross-plan feature on its $19–$47/user/mo unlimited-texting plans but routes BAA questions to sales. SimpleTexting ($39 for 500 credits, scaling to $119 for 3,000) and SlickText ($29 for 500 credits, up to $129 for 3,500) both market HIPAA-compliant healthcare texting in their collateral while their pricing pages stay silent on the agreement.
None of this means those five won’t sign — it means you can’t tell from the page, and a buyer in healthcare shouldn’t have to guess. The cheapest published HIPAA-marketed entry point in the set is Quo’s Starter at $19/user/mo, ahead of SlickText’s $29 and SimpleTexting’s $39 — but the lower the sticker, the further the BAA tends to recede into a sales conversation.
How to read this
If “HIPAA-compliant” is doing the work in a vendor’s marketing, ask for the BAA before you ask for the price. By that test the field collapses from seven names to two: Avochato, with fully public per-segment pricing ($0 + $0.08, or $210/mo + $0.03) and a BAA on its Custom tier, and Textline, the purpose-built HIPAA shared inbox that signs BAAs for an added fee but won’t show its base price until you talk to sales. Everyone else is selling the badge and keeping the contract in reserve.