An independent guide, with the incentives stated up front

Who this is for

Small businesses that message customers: clinics, contractors, salons, restaurants, agents, shops. Businesses where the person evaluating this is also the person who answers the phone, and who does not have a marketing team to hand it to.

If you run a two-hundred-seat sales floor, the vendors’ own enterprise material will serve you better. This site optimizes for the five-person business trying to work out whether a $99 line is worth it.

How we research

Provider information comes from each vendor’s own public pages — their pricing page, their documentation, their feature descriptions. When a vendor does not state whether they support something, we write not stated rather than assuming. When we show a code sample we say whether it came from published documentation or whether it is illustrative.

Marketing figures are labelled as marketing figures. When Miss Blue says iMessage outreach produced 37% more attributed revenue than SMS, that is a real claim from their beta analysis and we cite it as theirs — not as a finding of ours. The number that should move your budget is the one you measure on your own customers.

How we make money

Links to providers on this site carry tracking parameters that identify us as the referrer. If a relationship pays a referral fee, we may earn from it. Those links are marked rel="sponsored" in the page source.

What that does not buy: placement, ratings, or the removal of anything inconvenient. The pages here tell you when a provider gates its API docs, when its fallback behaviour is unclear, and when self-hosting for free is a legitimate option. We publish the risks of the whole category — including that Apple has not sanctioned it — on the page most likely to send someone to a vendor.

What we will not do

• Present vendor marketing numbers as independent research.
• Recommend iMessage to a business whose customers are mostly on Android. See when this is the wrong channel.
• Skip the compliance conversation because it makes the pitch harder.
• Publish pricing without saying when we last checked it.

Corrections

Pricing and features in this category change often, and some of what is here will go stale. If you find something wrong — especially if you work at one of the providers — tell us and we will fix it and note the change.