Guide · Business Texting
What a picture text actually costs: MMS pricing is buried in the plan notes, and vendors count it four different ways
Sending one photo instead of one line of text can cost the same, triple, or add a flat per-message surcharge — depending entirely on how your texting vendor decides to count an MMS.
The short answer: there is no single MMS surcharge in business texting, because vendors count a picture message in four fundamentally different ways — and several land on the same method without agreeing on the price. The same photo blast can cost you exactly the same as a plain text, three times as much, or the plain rate plus a flat per-message fee — and which one you get is a line buried in the plan notes, not a headline on the pricing page.
Here is what one MMS costs versus one SMS across the priced vendors that publish an explicit MMS rule, using only the rates each vendor publishes.
Four ways to count the same photo
| Vendor | SMS cost | MMS cost | How the picture is counted |
|---|---|---|---|
| EZ Texting | 1 credit | 3 credits | MMS burns 3× the credit allowance |
| Textla | $0.01/SMS (US) | $0.03/MMS | Flat per-message price, 3× the SMS rate |
| Sakari | base rate | +$0.02/msg | SMS rate plus a flat MMS surcharge |
| Avochato | $0.08 or $0.03/seg | same per segment | No MMS premium — metered flat by segment |
| Heymarket | $0.03/segment | $0.03/segment | SMS and MMS metered at the identical rate |
The spread is the whole story. On EZ Texting, the pricing page states plainly that “1 credit = 1 SMS, 3 credits = 1 MMS.” So on its Launch plan — $25/mo for 500 credits — a pure-SMS sender gets 500 messages, but a sender who only sends pictures gets just 166 MMS (500 ÷ 3, rounded down) out of the same allowance. The sticker price never changes; your effective volume drops by two-thirds.
Textla lands at the same 3× multiple but expresses it as cash. Its pricing is a pure per-message model: $0.01 per SMS in the US, $0.03 per MMS. There is no credit bucket to deplete — you simply pay two cents more every time you attach an image, on top of the $25/mo ($19 annual) Starter base.
Sakari keeps its MMS premium small and flat: its pricing notes add $0.02 per message for MMS on top of the standard segment rate, against a $25/mo entry base. That is the same two-cent incremental step Textla charges (its $0.03 MMS is exactly $0.02 above its $0.01 SMS), but Sakari expresses it as an explicit add-on rather than baking it into a higher headline MMS rate. Either way it is a real surcharge, but a flat one — it does not scale with message length the way a credit-multiplier can.
The vendors where a picture is free
Among the metered, per-segment vendors featured here, two charge a picture exactly what they charge a sentence. Avochato meters every segment flat — $0.08 per segment on pay-as-you-go, dropping to $0.03 once you’re on the $210/mo Standard plan — and that per-segment rate is the same whether the segment carries text or a picture. Heymarket, on its per-user model, meters “SMS/MMS at $0.03/segment” with a single rate covering both. For an image-heavy use case — a contractor sending job photos, a salon texting style shots — a flat-per-segment vendor can be dramatically cheaper than a 3× credit-multiplier vendor, even if its headline base looks higher.
They are not the only no-surcharge options in the wider field, though, and a picture-heavy buyer should not stop here. Two more vendors carry no MMS premium because they do not meter individual messages at all: Quo (formerly OpenPhone) bundles unlimited US/CA texts into its per-seat price from $19/user/mo with no per-message metering, so an MMS costs nothing extra over an SMS; and Text-Em-All’s monthly plan — priced by contact-group size from $19/mo — adds no per-message cost when you text the same groups, which means no MMS line item either. The trade-off is structural rather than per-picture: Quo charges per seat and Text-Em-All prices by audience size, so “free MMS” there is a property of the billing model, not a published SMS-vs-MMS comparison.
A word of caution on “segment,” though: MMS is physically a larger payload than a 160-character SMS, so a flat per-segment vendor can still bill an MMS as multiple segments if the carrier splits it. The published rate is per segment, not per message — and the dataset records the rate, not the carrier’s segmentation behavior.
The credit vendors that stay quiet
SimpleTexting sits in the murkiest middle. Its pricing notes say only that “1 credit = 1 standard 160-char SMS; MMS/long msgs use more” without publishing the exact multiplier, while extra credits run 5.5 cents each. So an MMS costs “more” — but how much more isn’t on the page, which is exactly the kind of buried rule a buyer planning a picture campaign needs to pin down before signing.
How to read this
If you send mostly plain texts, the MMS rule is a footnote. If pictures are central to your messaging, it’s the single most important number on the page — and it’s almost never on the page. On a 500-credit budget, EZ Texting’s 3-credits-per-MMS rule quietly cuts you to 166 sends; Textla charges the same 3× as hard cash; Sakari adds a flat two cents; and Avochato or Heymarket charge a picture the same as a sentence. Same photo, four billing methods. And if you can live with a per-seat or by-audience model, Quo’s unlimited texting and Text-Em-All’s monthly plan sidestep the surcharge entirely. The vendor that’s cheapest for SMS is frequently not the one that’s cheapest for MMS — so before you pick on the headline number, find the line in the notes that says what a picture actually costs.