The $25 setup & SMS activation fee, explained

Before any business in the United States is allowed to send automated text messages, the mobile carriers require that business to be registered, verified, and approved. The one-time $25 fee funds that registration process end to end: the fees charged by the registration authorities and carriers, the activation of your business phone number, and the compliance work required for your messages to be accepted and delivered instead of filtered as spam.

Who are the mobile carriers? In plain terms, this means the nationwide carrier ecosystem that delivers texts to customers on AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Boost Mobile, including familiar prepaid and virtual-carrier brands such as Cricket Wireless, Metro by T-Mobile, Mint Mobile, Ultra Mobile, Google Fi, Visible, Total Wireless, Straight Talk, Tracfone, Simple Mobile, SafeLink Wireless, Walmart Family Mobile, Page Plus, Xfinity Mobile, and Spectrum Mobile. Smaller regional and prepaid providers are part of this same ecosystem, too.

Because the registration fees are charged by third parties the moment your business is submitted for review — and those third parties do not return them — this fee is non-refundable once registration begins. The details of all of this are below.

The carriers draw a hard line between two kinds of text messages. Person-to-person (P2P) messaging is two humans texting each other from their phones. Application-to-person (A2P) messaging is any message sent by software on behalf of a business — appointment confirmations, auto-replies to missed calls, web chat follow-ups. Everything SimplAssist sends for you is A2P.

For years, spammers abused ordinary local phone numbers to blast unwanted A2P messages, so U.S. carriers responded by building a framework called 10DLC ("10-Digit Long Code" — industry shorthand for a standard 10-digit local phone number approved for business messaging). Under 10DLC, every business sending automated messages must register who it is and what it sends before carriers will deliver its traffic. Messages from unregistered numbers are aggressively filtered, blocked, and in some cases fined by the carriers.

This is not a SimplAssist rule — it is an industry-wide requirement that applies to every company sending business text messages in the U.S., from the smallest local shop to the largest airline.

The Campaign Registry (TCR) is the central registry the U.S. mobile network operators jointly appointed to run the 10DLC system. TCR collects the identity of every registered business (a "Brand" in their terminology) and the description of every approved messaging use case (a "Campaign"), coordinates the vetting of both, and passes the results to the carriers. TCR and its vetting partners charge fees for brand registration and campaign review — these are real third-party charges incurred for your business specifically, and they are a core part of what the setup fee covers.

1. Brand registration. Your business identity — legal name, EIN, address, and contact details — is submitted to The Campaign Registry, which verifies it against government and business records. This is how carriers know that messages from your number come from a real, identifiable business rather than an anonymous sender. TCR charges a registration fee for every brand filed.

2. Campaign registration and carrier vetting. Alongside your identity, we register what you send: a description of your use case, sample messages, expected volume, and how customers opt in and out of receiving texts. This campaign is reviewed by the registry's vetting partners and by the carriers themselves before any message is allowed through. Campaign review carries its own third-party fees, which the setup fee covers. (Campaigns also carry small ongoing carrier fees after approval — those are included in your monthly plan, not billed separately.)

3. Phone number activation. Your business phone number is provisioned, attached to your approved campaign, and activated for both calling and messaging. A number that is not linked to an approved campaign cannot legally carry A2P traffic, so this linking step is what actually switches your texting on.

4. Carrier-required compliance pages. Carrier reviewers check that your business publishes a privacy policy, terms of service, and clear opt-in/opt-out disclosures before they approve your campaign. We create and host these pages for your business as part of setup, and they remain live for as long as you use SimplAssist — reviewers and customers can verify them at any time.

5. Verification and filing work. Before anything is submitted, we review your registration details for the issues that most commonly cause rejections — mismatched legal names, EIN formatting, incomplete use-case descriptions — and prepare the filing so it has the best chance of first-pass approval.

Registration through The Campaign Registry covers the mobile network operators that participate in the 10DLC program directly: AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, U.S. Cellular, and the infrastructure providers (ClearSky and Interop Technologies) that route messaging for smaller regional networks.

It also covers the carriers your customers are most likely to actually name — Cricket, Metro by T-Mobile, Visible, Mint Mobile, Boost Mobile, Straight Talk, and the other prepaid brands. These companies do not own their own networks; they run on AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon infrastructure, so one registration with the big three reaches all of them automatically. In practice, a single approved 10DLC registration covers effectively every mobile phone in the United States.

The other side of that coin: if your registration is rejected, we do not charge you again. We diagnose the rejection reason, correct the filing or appeal the decision with the carriers, and resubmit at no additional charge until your business is approved.

Most registrations are approved within a few business days of payment. Some filings are flagged for additional review — common for newly formed businesses or use cases the carriers scrutinize more closely — which can extend the process to a few weeks. You do not need to do anything during the wait: we monitor your registration status continuously, keep your onboarding progress saved, and notify you the moment your number is cleared to send.

A2P — Application-to-person: messages sent by software on behalf of a business, as opposed to person-to-person texting.

10DLC — 10-Digit Long Code: the carriers' registration framework for sending A2P messages over standard local phone numbers.

TCR / The Campaign Registry — The central registry the carriers use to collect and vet business registrations.

Brand — Your registered business identity within TCR: legal name, EIN, address, and contacts.

Campaign — Your registered messaging use case: what you send, to whom, at what volume, and how recipients opt in and out.

MNO — Mobile Network Operator: a carrier that owns its own network (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon).

MVNO — Mobile Virtual Network Operator: a carrier brand that rents capacity on an MNO's network (Cricket, Mint, Visible, Metro, Boost).

We are happy to walk through any of this before you pay. Reach us through the support page or email [email protected].