Nothing should be a surprise.
Business messaging in the United States has a dirty little secret: almost nobody can tell you, in advance, what a text message will actually cost. Between the carriers, the registries, the aggregators, and a tax code with a thousand moving parts, the simple act of sending a message has been turned into one of the most confusing line items on your bill. SimplyRCS was built to end that. We show you every fee, every surcharge, and an estimate of every tax, before you ever hit send. What you see is what you pay.
In practice that means SimplyRCS publishes its full US rate card openly, on this site, rather than behind a sales call: $0.0039 per SMS or RCS text segment, $0.0150 for MMS or an RCS card or media message, $0.0004 per RCS device check, with no monthly platform or agent fee and a one-time $250 RCS Sender ID setup and review per sender (waived with Premium Support). The software itself is free, with the app, API, bots, inbox, and analytics included, so there is no platform cost at all. Carrier surcharges, Campaign Registry fees, Aegis sender vetting, and telecom taxes are itemized at cost and never marked up, and they are estimated before you check out rather than explained after the invoice arrives.
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Rates and tax figures last verified June 2026; the carrier tables on the pricing page include Verizon's surcharge increase from 1 October 2026.
Why your messaging bill makes no sense.
A single business text passes through a chain of companies, and almost every one of them takes a piece. By the time a message reaches your customer, its “price” has been built up from layers most providers never bother to explain:
- The per-message rate, the part you were quoted, and usually the only part you were quoted.
- Carrier pass-through surcharges, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and US Cellular each levy their own per-message fee on business traffic. They’re non-negotiable, they vary by carrier, and they’re charged on top of the message rate.
- Registry fees, before you can send at all, US carriers require you to register through The Campaign Registry: a brand-registration fee, a brand-vetting fee, a per-campaign vetting fee, and a recurring monthly fee for every campaign you run.
- RCS sender fees, carriers also charge to register and maintain a verified RCS sender, often billed annually per sender.
- Number and short-code costs, long-code rentals, toll-free verification, or a short-code lease that can run into the hundreds per month.
- The penalty fees, failed-message charges, surcharges for unregistered traffic, fees to change a sender profile you already paid to create.
Each gatekeeper is looking for its small squeeze. Individually the charges look minor; stacked together and left unexplained, they turn a predictable expense into a monthly guessing game. Most platforms are happy to leave it that way, the confusion hides the markup.
And then there are the taxes.
If the fees are confusing, US telecom taxes are in a category of their own. America runs one of the most complicated communications-tax systems on earth, so complicated that an entire industry exists for the sole purpose of helping companies figure out what they owe. We are not anti-tax. We just think it’s a little absurd that working out the tax on a text message can require specialized software, a compliance team, and a quarterly subscription to keep up.
Here is the landscape a messaging bill sits inside:
- The Federal Universal Service Fund (USF), a federal surcharge reset by the FCC every quarter. The contribution factor has climbed from roughly 17% a decade ago to about 37% in 2026, a rate that changes four times a year, before any state touches it.
- State USF and relay-service fees, most states run their own funds on top of the federal one, each set by its own commission, each with its own rate.
- E911 (and now 988) surcharges, imposed at the state level, often again at the county level, and sometimes again at the city level, as a flat per-line fee in one place and a percentage in the next.
- State and local communications and sales taxes, fifty states, thousands of local jurisdictions, and rules that differ on whether messaging is even taxable, and how.
- Tax on tax, in some states a surcharge is calculated on an amount that already includes another tax, so the math literally compounds on itself.
None of it holds still. The federal rate changes quarterly; state and local rates change constantly; and the right amount depends on jurisdictions mapped down to the ZIP code. It is, genuinely, a maze. The difference is what your provider does about it: bury it in a vague “taxes & fees” blob at the bottom of an invoice, or show you the pieces and estimate them up front. We chose the second one.