Guide · Online Booking
Which booking tool includes text reminders — and exactly how many SMS you get per tier
Text reminders are bundled by some booking tools and sold as add-on credits by others; here is the per-tier SMS allowance, vendor by vendor, with the price attached.
“Does it text my clients” sounds like a yes/no feature question. It isn’t. In booking software, SMS is a metered resource, and the number that matters is how many texts a tier hands you before you start buying credit packs. Two tools can both “include SMS” and differ by an order of magnitude in what that means. Here is the per-tier allowance, with the price next to it.
The direct answer, by allowance
If you want the most texts bundled into a flat subscription, the answer is Booksy: its single all-inclusive plan is $29.99/mo for the first user (plus $20/mo per additional team member) and includes 2,000 free SMS per month — no tiering, no credit packs to reason about. For a solo operator that is the cleanest “it just texts everyone” setup in this index.
If you’d rather scale the allowance to your actual volume, vcita ladders it explicitly across three per-seat tiers (annual-billed rate, plus a one-time $150 setup session):
| Vendor / tier | Monthly price | Bundled SMS / mo |
|---|---|---|
| Booksy (all-inclusive) | $29.99 + $20/extra user | 2,000 |
| vcita Kickstart | $35/seat | 100 US (20 non-US) |
| vcita Business | $54/seat | 250 US (50 non-US) |
| vcita Platinum | $93/seat | 500 US (100 non-US) |
| GReminders Professional | $47/seat | 320 SMS/phone credits |
| Setmore Pro | $12/user (or $5 annual) | included, count not published |
Every price above is from the vendor’s own pricing page. The vcita rates are the annual-billed figures the cards display; only Platinum also publishes a month-to-month price ($110/seat).
The catch that decides the cheapest text reminder
The cheapest door into SMS reminders is not a dedicated reminder tool at all — it’s Picktime Pro at $2.25/user/mo billed annually, whose feature list names SMS outright. Next cheapest is Setmore Pro at $5/user/mo billed annually ($12 month-to-month), where text reminders are a Pro-tier feature absent from the free plan entirely. Neither publishes a monthly SMS count, so you cannot size them the way you can size vcita or GReminders — they are the two lowest sticker prices for “has SMS reminders,” and the least quantified. (Picktime’s Starter tier is a touch more at $3/user/mo annual, but it’s Pro that carries the SMS line item.)
GReminders is the opposite: it tells you the number but charges for the tier. Its free Basic plan does no SMS at all (100 email reminders, email only). Standard ($10/user/mo monthly, $8 annual) still routes SMS through add-on credit packs. Only Professional at $47/user/mo ($39 annual) bundles a stated 320 SMS/phone credits per month, plus a dedicated phone number — and when you exhaust it, packs run $13 for 160 texts up to $200 for 5,000. That pack ladder is the honest tell that 320 is a starting allowance, not a ceiling.
”Marketing texts” are not the same line item
One number looks like it beats Booksy and doesn’t, quite. GlossGenius bundles 500 marketing texts on Gold ($48/mo annual) and 2,500 on Platinum ($148/mo annual) — a higher headline figure than Booksy’s 2,000. But these are flat-plan marketing texts (campaigns, blasts), and GlossGenius’s Standard tier ($24/mo annual) ships with “unlimited notifications” rather than a counted reminder pool. If your need is transactional appointment reminders, Booksy’s 2,000 is the largest bundle aimed squarely at that job; GlossGenius’s 2,500 is the largest number in the index, but it is pointed at promotion, not at the “you’re booked for Tuesday” text.
That distinction is the whole article. A reminder SMS and a marketing SMS come out of different buckets, priced differently, and conflating them is how buyers overpay.
Everything else makes you buy credits
The rest of the field treats SMS as a pure add-on or an unquantified feature flag with no monthly bundle to count. Bookeo sells SMS/FAX credits “from $0.09/credit” across its $14.95–$119.95 flat tiers — no allowance included. Picktime lists SMS on its Pro tier ($2.25/user/mo annual), and TidyCal lists SMS reminders (US/CA) on its $79 one-time Agency Lifetime tier only — not on its $12/mo Pro plan, whose feature list omits SMS entirely — but neither Picktime nor TidyCal publishes a monthly count. And several popular schedulers — Calendly, Cal.com, Acuity, Appointlet, YouCanBookMe, Doodle, plus Square Appointments — lead with email reminders and publish no bundled SMS allowance at all on the tiers we could price. The two quote-only platforms in the index, Fresha and Vagaro, publish no confirmable US plan to read an SMS figure from either.
How to read this
There is no single “includes SMS” winner, because the question hides three different buyers. If you want the largest no-thinking bundle, Booksy’s 2,000/mo at $29.99 is it. If you want to match allowance to volume, vcita’s 100 / 250 / 500 ladder ($35 / $54 / $93 per seat) is the only one that scales a stated reminder SMS count explicitly across tiers (GReminders publishes a single 320; GlossGenius’s tiered 500 / 2,500 are marketing texts, not reminders). If you just want the cheapest door into text reminders and can live without a published count, the lowest sticker price in the index is Picktime Pro at $2.25/user/mo annual — its feature list names SMS, undercutting even Setmore Pro’s $5/user/mo. And if you see a four-figure SMS number, check whether it’s reminders or marketing before you let it move your decision — that is where the headline figure and the line item you actually need part ways.