10DLC registration: brands, campaigns, trust scores, fees and when to pick toll-free

Register your business as a brand with its legal name, tax ID (EIN), address and website; then register one campaign that says what you will text, with sample messages and the page where people opt in. Approval usually takes 1 to 5 business days. The brand’s checks give it a trust score that sets its daily limit, and the campaign’s type sets how fast its texts can go out.

On Rasket, local numbers and 10DLC registration are available on every paid plan: $15 a month for your business’s registration and $2 a month per local number. Rasket still recommends a toll-free number first, because it needs no brand registration and reaches Canadian phones too.

10DLC stands for ten-digit long code: a normal local phone number, like the one on a shop’s sign, used by software to send texts. Business texting from these numbers is called A2P 10DLC, application-to-person. For years carriers treated it like texting between friends, which made it cheap for businesses and easy for spammers.

Registration closed that gap. The Campaign Registry describes itself as the backbone of the 10DLC messaging ecosystem: a channel in which brands and the providers that send for them are verified before they can send. Brands cannot register with it directly; a messaging provider registers them and their campaigns on their behalf, and the campaign ID it receives is what links your numbers to your registration. (The Campaign Registry.)

The carriers then apply the CTIA guidelines to registered traffic: consent before texting, the sender named in the message, opt-out by replying STOP, and no spreading of traffic across many numbers to dodge filters, which CTIA calls snowshoeing. (CTIA Messaging Principles and Best Practices.) Unregistered business traffic on local numbers is filtered, so registration is not optional for anyone sending at scale.

The brand is the business behind the texts. It is registered once and reused by every campaign and number after it. It asks for:

• the legal name, exactly as on your tax registration;
• the kind of entity (private company, public company, non-profit) and its industry;
• the EIN, and the registered address that goes with it;
• a website that loads and names the business;
• a contact person who can be reached.

The brand is checked against official records. A mismatch between the name and the tax ID is the classic failure: “Acme” on the form and “Acme Holdings LLC” on the EIN letter looks like two businesses. Type what the registration says, not what the logo says.

A campaign describes one kind of texting from the brand. It asks for:

• the use: transactional (codes, orders, appointments), marketing, or both in one mixed campaign;
• two or three sample messages, each starting with your brand, written as you will send them;
• how people opt in, with a link to the page where they do, and optionally a screenshot;
• the keywords people can reply with, such as STOP and HELP;
• an estimate of how many texts a month you will send.

The campaign is read against its samples and its opt-in. A campaign that says “order updates” with a sample offering 20% off will be refused, and so will an opt-in page that hides the texting consent inside the terms of service. CTIA’s guidelines are explicit that promotional texts need the person’s written agreement first, so a marketing campaign needs an opt-in that shows the phone field, an unticked box and the words being agreed to.

The same rules about opt-in proof apply to toll-free numbers, so toll free verification walks through what a reviewer wants to see on that page in more detail.

When the brand is checked it receives a 10DLC trust score. The score reflects how well the brand’s details could be verified, and it sets the brand’s daily cap: how many texts a day it may send. A brand with thin or mismatched details gets a lower score and a lower cap.

Throughput, how many texts a second can leave, comes from the campaign: its type and the class each carrier gives it. A marketing campaign for a small brand and a transactional campaign for a large one are not given the same speed.

The registry charges one-time fees to register and vet a brand, and the carriers add surcharges to each registered text. Providers pass these on in different ways. On Rasket the whole of it comes to two lines:

Inbound texts are free, and a text that fails is never billed. The registration fee stops when the registration ends or the plan moves to Free; the SMS feature page shows the price per message on every plan.

Three kinds of number can send business texts in the US. They differ in who checks you, where they reach, and what they cost.

Rasket registers one brand and one mixed-use campaign per team, so a single $15 registration covers every local number the team buys. The steps:

1. In SMS → Numbers, choose a local number. Rasket fills in your website from your first verified domain and your address and tax ID from billing, and drafts the brand name, sample texts and opt-in description for you to edit.
2. Type what it will not guess: the legal name, the kind of entity, the industry, the contact and the opt-in page. It shows what is still missing before you submit.
3. Rasket registers the brand, then the campaign, then attaches the number. The number is in review while that happens, usually 1 to 5 business days.
4. Meanwhile, test from the shared Rasket test number to your own verified phones. Every admin gets an email when the registration is decided.

If a registration is rejected, the reason and the fields to fix are on the number, and three corrections are included. Your local numbers share the one registration, so canceling it sends all of them back to testing until you send it again. Everything here works through the API too; Get a number has the requests and every status a number moves through.

Once approved, texts from your numbers sit beside your email in the same API, contacts, campaigns and automations. Before you send marketing from them, read Consent and STOP; for help choosing between a text and an email for a given message, see SMS vs email marketing. The rest of what each plan includes is on the plans page.