A2P 10DLC: What It Is, What It Costs, and Whether You Need It

If those texts go out as SMS from a 10-digit US number, yes. Carriers have blocked unregistered 10DLC traffic since February 1, 2025, so unregistered messages simply don't arrive. Cold outbound is also the hardest campaign type to get approved, because reviewers check for documented, unbundled opt-in and reject anything that reads like a purchased list. Channels that don't use carrier SMS, like iMessage, never enter that system.

Blocked at the carrier, not throttled. On top of that, T-Mobile's Sev-0 penalty schedule applies: $1,000 for snowshoeing or replacing numbers to evade filters, $2,000 for phishing and social engineering, and $10,000 for a third or subsequent content violation from the same sender. Those are pass-through charges, so your messaging provider bills them to you.

No. iMessage is an internet protocol and never touches the carrier SMS network, so there's nothing for The Campaign Registry to register: no brand, no campaign, no trust score, no per-message carrier surcharge, and no carrier-set daily ceiling. TCPA, consent, and opt-out obligations still apply in full. The registration layer is what goes away, not the compliance layer.

The recurring campaign fee is $10 a month for a standard campaign, $2 for sole proprietor, $1.50 for low-volume mixed use, $3 for charity, and $5 for emergency services. Carrier surcharges then run roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per SMS segment depending on carrier. At 50,000 segments a month that's $150 to $250 in carrier fees alone, before your provider's own per-message rate.

Four things cause most fixable rejections: consent language (pre-checked boxes, opt-in bundled into terms, no message frequency or rate disclosure), website problems (missing privacy policy, page behind a login, dead URL), identity mismatches (brand name that doesn't match the EIN, personal email domain), and weak use case detail (identical sample messages, vague descriptions). Since June 30, 2026, Twilio also rejects API submissions with no working privacy policy and terms URL.

For a blue bubble, yes, the recipient needs to be on iMessage. Blue Reacher falls back to RCS and then SMS when a contact isn't reachable there, so Android contacts still receive the message, just not as a blue bubble. In practice most B2B mobile lists in the US skew heavily toward iPhone, which is why the channel converts the way it does.

Plan on one to four weeks end to end, and three to six weeks for full approval across every major carrier. Brand registration clears in one to three business days; campaign review is the variable, running 24 to 72 hours for clean transactional campaigns and three to fourteen business days for anything marketing-flavored, with AT&T's manual review able to add two to four weeks. Each rejection and resubmission adds roughly five to ten business days.

When your brand registers, The Campaign Registry assigns it a score from 0 to 100 at vetting, and carriers use that score to set how much you're allowed to send. It drives everything downstream: an unvetted brand gets 2,000 messages a day on T-Mobile, a score of 25 to 49 gets 10,000, 50 to 74 gets 40,000, and only 75 and above reaches 200,000 (Infobip 10DLC throughput reference). Standard vetting costs $41.50 and is optional on paper, required in practice.

Your daily A2P sending ceiling depends on your trust score, and it is brand-wide, shared across every campaign. T-Mobile caps an unvetted brand at 2,000 messages a day, which a five-rep team sending 400 first-touches each hits before a single follow-up. AT&T limits by transactions per minute instead, from 4,500 TPM at the top standard classes down to 240 at the bottom. Raising the cap means vetting, and vetting is the part that takes weeks.

SHAFT content (sex, hate, alcohol, firearms, tobacco), cannabis, prescription drugs, loans, gambling, crypto and MLM are permanent rejections rather than fixable ones. Public URL shorteners and plain HTTP links also get flagged as high risk, which surprises sales teams because shortened tracking links are standard practice in email.

Yes. The sole proprietor tier runs $24.50 for bundled registration and $2 per month per campaign, against $71.91 and $10 for a high-volume standard brand (HighLevel A2P fee schedule, effective August 1, 2025). The tradeoff is throughput: sole proprietor campaigns carry the tightest sending limits, so the tier fits a genuinely small operation rather than a team trying to save on fees.

When your texting is high-volume transactional to an opted-in customer base: order confirmations, appointment reminders, two-factor codes, shipping updates. Those campaigns approve fastest, often inside 24 hours, and per-message fees are trivial next to the value of delivery. Register too if you need a short code, or if reaching every device on any platform matters more to your workflow than reply rate.

Under HighLevel's bundled schedule a resubmission carries no additional fee, but each cycle costs five to ten business days of sending time, and TCR often rejects on the first problem it finds, so a fixed submission can bounce again for an issue the first rejection never mentioned. The real cost of rejection is calendar, not cash.