SMS Marketing Industry News

Verizon Plans to Add Fee to SMS Long Code Messages

In November 2018, the news broke that Verizon plans to add a $0.0025 fee to SMS long code messages, and that the telecommunications company will start to implement this fee in February 2019.

At Tatango, we often work with, and talk about short codes. However, the topic of this blog article is long codes. Before we discuss the upcoming long code fee from Verizon, it is important to explain in short what long codes are, and how they differentiate themselves from short codes.

What Are Long Codes and Short Codes

Long codes are essentially regular phone numbers due to the fact that they have 10 digits. Organizations can only use long codes for non-marketing purposes. As such, they cannot be used for text message marketing campaigns.

When brands want to send out text messages for marketing purposes, they need to use short codes, which are 4 to 6-digit phone numbers. Carrier pass-through fees for short code messages already exist, but we will now also start to see them being added to long code SMS messages by companies like Verizon.

The Upcoming Verizon Fee for Long Code Messages

In February 2019, Verizon will introduce the very first United States carrier fee for long code application-to-person messaging (A2P). This means that if you send out messages on a long code, you are going to pay a little bit more per message. If, for example, you now pay an SMS provider $0,01 to send a message on a long code, a fee of $0.0025 will be added to your bill for every text message that is send out.

That $0.0025 charge is called a pass-through fee, because it is passed on from the brand to the SMS provider, and then it is transferred to the wireless carrier. The fee will be added to the above mentioned $0,01 for the SMS provider. In total, the brand then has to pay $0.0125 per message. This can be a significant cost increase for brands that run long code messaging campaigns.

For now, Verizon is the only wireless carrier that plans to introduce such a messaging fee, but it is to be expected that other carriers will soon follow with their very own carrier-pass-through fees.  

If you want to learn more about Verizon’s upcoming plan to add a $0.0025 charge to SMS long code messages, then you can watch our video about this announcement. We have released it on our Tatango YouTube channel, and you can watch it here.

About Tatango

Tatango provides text message marketing software, allowing marketers to build and manage their SMS, MMS, and RCS marketing campaigns. Since founding the text message marketing software company in 2007, Tatango has powered some of the largest, and most well-known SMS, MMS, and RCS mobile marketing campaigns in the world.

Tatango is a privately held corporation headquartered in Seattle, WA, with investments from the Seattle Alliance of Angels. Get in contact with us if you like to learn more about our text message marketing software solutions.

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