Compliant business texting setup
Uncleared business texts do not bounce. They just never arrive.
US carriers drop automated messages from businesses that have not been cleared to send them, and the sending tool still says delivered. This is the work that gets you cleared, including the rejections, on a fixed price that turns on one thing about your website.
The part nobody warns you about
Sending automated text messages to US phones requires the business behind them to be registered and approved first. That is a carrier rule, not a preference, and it applies to appointment reminders and confirmations just as much as it applies to anything that looks like marketing.
When a business is not cleared, the messages are discarded in transit and the sender is told nothing.
There is no bounce, no error, no red mark on a dashboard. The tool reports them as sent. So the failure looks exactly like customers ignoring you, which is a very expensive thing to believe about your own customers for six months.
Two routes, and most businesses should take the first one
The choice between them is the first decision in this work and the one that decides how long everything else takes. It gets made in the first conversation, before anything is filed.
A toll free number, verified
For most businesses this is the answer, and it skips campaign registration entirely. The number is verified once against how you collect consent and what you intend to send. It carries good throughput, it is not tied to a local area code, and it avoids the process below altogether.
We route almost everybody here. If your business genuinely needs a local number, we say so and we file the other way.
Your local number, registered
Registering a standard ten digit local number to send automated messages means registering your business with the carriers, then registering each campaign, each with its own review. It is the slower and more exacting path, and it is the right one when the number customers already know has to be the number that texts them.
This is where filings get rejected, and where the rejection reasons are written in a vocabulary nobody outside the industry has met before.
The price turns on who controls your website
Not on your size, your industry, or how many messages you plan to send. The filing needs specific pages published on your site, and how hard that is to do is the whole difference.
We can publish to your site
$750
We write the consent page, put it live, file, and handle whatever comes back. If you had the $300 readiness analysis, this is $450: $750 less the $300 credit.
An agency owns your site
$1,250
Same work, plus getting the pages live through somebody else, which is a request, a review of what they actually published, and usually a second request. With the analysis credited, this is $950: $1,250 less $300.
No usable website
Site first, $1,200 to $3,500
A reviewer opens a page on your site to check consent, so there has to be a site. That band is the prerequisite build inside this engagement and nothing else. It is not what a website costs at Fathom, which is a separate conversation on the websites page. The $300 credits against the setup, not against the site.
Rejections are included until you are approved. Not three attempts, not a capped number of cycles.
Four things decide whether a filing passes
We know these because our own campaign was rejected three times before it went through, and the rejection codes name a reason in a vocabulary that does not appear anywhere a business owner would have met it.
The opt-in has to exist somewhere a reviewer can open
A reviewer checks that people agreed to be texted, and they check it by visiting a page on your website and reading it. Describing your consent process in the form is not the same as showing it, and this is the single most common reason a filing comes back.
The wording on that page is examined, not skimmed
It has to name who is sending, what kind of messages, roughly how many, that rates may apply, and how to stop. Missing one of those is enough. We write the page, and it goes live before anything is filed.
What you say you will send has to match what you send
A filing describing appointment reminders does not cover a promotion, and the mismatch surfaces later as messages quietly failing rather than as an error anybody sees. We scope the filing to what you actually intend to do, including the parts you have not started yet.
The business details have to agree with the public record
Legal name, registered identifier, address, the person named on it. These are checked against records you do not control, and a version of your name that differs from the filed one is a rejection that reads as though nothing is wrong.
Being cleared is the door, not the room.
Once your number can send, the things worth sending are the ones that were falling on the floor: a text back to every caller you missed, a confirmation nobody has to remember, a reminder the day before, a reply to the person who messaged the number on your van and got nothing.
All of it running off the same understanding of your business as the phone line.
A change to your hours or your prices is one change, and every surface a customer reaches you through says the new thing. That is the part a messaging tool has no way to do, because it does not know anything about you and was never connected to anything that does.
When not to buy this yet
If you are not sure you have a problem. The $300 readiness analysis tells you where you stand and what is blocking you, and it comes off this price in full if you go ahead. Buying the fix before knowing the diagnosis is the wrong order.
If you have no intention of texting customers. This is not a thing to have in place for later. The filing describes what you intend to send, and one filed against intentions you never act on is work you paid for early.
If somebody has already cleared you. Some platforms register their customers as part of onboarding and never say so plainly. Tell us who you send through and we will tell you whether you are already covered, which is a five minute answer and not an invoice.
Questions
What actually happens if I just start texting?
The messages are dropped on the way to the handset, and nothing reports it back to you. Your sending tool shows them as delivered, the customer never receives them, and you find out from the customer who says they never heard from you. That silence is the reason this work exists.
How long does approval take?
We do not promise a date, because the review sits with the carriers and it has moved more than once. What we can tell you is that we file it complete the first time, and that when it does come back for something, fixing it and refiling is our job and not a new invoice.
What if it gets rejected?
We refile until it is approved. Not three attempts, not a capped number of cycles. Rejections are part of this work rather than an exception to it, and a price that stopped covering you partway through would be a price that quits at the hardest point.
Why does it cost more if an agency built my website?
The clearance needs specific pages live on your site before it can be filed. When we can publish them, that is an afternoon. When somebody else controls the site, it becomes a request into a queue, a review of what they published, and usually a second request because a line was changed in the process. The $500 difference is that round trip.
I paid for the readiness analysis. Do I pay this on top?
The $300 comes off. If we can publish to your site, $750 becomes $450. If an agency owns it, $1,250 becomes $950. The analysis was always meant to be the cheap way to find out where you stand, not a toll on the way to the fix.
Do I need this for missed-call text-back?
Yes, and it is included in that product's setup at the scope that product needs. This page is for a business that wants to text customers generally, which is a wider filing. If you want both, they are quoted as one job.
Tell us what you send and who controls your site.
Those two answers decide the route, the price and how long it takes, and both of them take you a sentence.
$750, or $1,250 when an agency owns your site. The $300 readiness analysis is credited in full against either.