Why 10DLC A2P Carrier Fees Keep Increasing 📈

If you’ve looked at your messaging bill lately, you’ve probably noticed a trend: carrier prices are moving “up and to the right.” Whether you’re sending via AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon, the cost of reaching your customers is climbing every year 🧗

But here’s the catch—most businesses don’t actually understand what they are paying for 🤷. To protect your margins, you have to understand the difference between Carrier Fees and Segment Pricing 👀

In this guide, we’re breaking down the technical architecture of A2P (Application-to-Person) pricing so you can stop overpaying ✋

Want to watch the video that inspired this post? You can do so Here!

Segment Pricing: The “Character Count” Trap 🔠

In the US, you pay an aggregator (like Signal House) per segment. A segment isn’t just “one text message.” It’s a packet of data, and its size depends on how you encode it:

• GSM-7 Encoding: Standard English characters. You get 160 characters per segment 😎

• UCS-2 Encoding: If you use a single emoji, a special character, or a non-English symbol, your limit drops to 70 characters per segment 😬

The Math: If you send a “quick” message that is 161 characters long but includes an emoji, you aren’t paying for one message—you’re paying for three segments 🤯

US vs. The World: Why the US is Unique 🇺🇸

In most of the world (UK, Australia, Canada, etc.), carrier fees and segment prices are bundled into one single price.

In the United States, they are separate and distinct.

1. Segment Price: What you pay your aggregator to process the data 💽

2. Carrier Fee: A pass-through fee charged by the carrier (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon) to deliver that data to the handset 📲

Because these are separate in the US, you have the power to negotiate your segment price based on volume. However, you can’t negotiate the carrier fee—that is set in stone by the “Big Three.”

The Carrier Breakdown: Who Owns the Market? 📱

When you look at your blended rate, it’s helpful to know who you’re actually paying. In the US, the market breakdown looks roughly like this:

• T-Mobile (including Sprint): ~44% market share. They are typically the most expensive carrier with the highest fees.

• AT&T: ~25% market share

• Verizon: ~26% market share

• Smaller MVNOs: The remaining 5%

The MMS “Hack”: 700KB for the Price of One 🖼️

MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) pricing is actually more predictable than SMS. While an SMS can spiral into 5 or 6 segments if you aren’t careful with your word count, one MMS is always one segment.

As long as your image or video stays within the carrier data threshold (usually 700KB to 1MB), you pay one flat rate.

Pro-Tip: To ensure 100% deliverability across all carriers, compress your images to stay under 700KB. AT&T has the strictest limits, and if you exceed them, the message won’t just “split”—it will simply fail.

How to Scale Without Breaking the Bank 🚀

At Signal House, we believe in transparency. While “name-brand” aggregators like Twilio often start their entry rates at $0.0083, we start at $0.0075.

As your volume grows, so should your savings. If you’re sending 4 million messages a month, your segment price shouldn’t be the same as someone sending 5,000. We work with our high-volume partners to buy that rate down as low as $0.004 🤯

Ready to optimize your messaging spend?

If you’re sending more than 500,000 segments a month, you shouldn’t just be a “ticket number” in a support queue. Signal House partners get:

• Direct Slack Access: Talk to our dev and success teams in real-time.

• One-Shot Integration: Use our new dev docs to integrate in 7+ coding languages in minutes.

• No Hidden Support Fees: We don’t charge you extra just to help you succeed.