If your business doesn’t have anyone whose actual job it’s to run marketing, an SMS platform earns its keep by paying for itself in three ways: repeat purchases from a small promo list, faster review collection, and appointment reminders that cut no-shows. The tools below all do those things. The differences are pricing, how much of the platform you get on day one, and whether SMS is a channel inside a bigger marketing tool or a standalone product.
Who this is for
This guide is for the owner or operator of a small business (roughly 1 to 30 employees) who wants to add SMS as a real channel, not just an occasional broadcast. If you run a Shopify store, jump to Postscript and Klaviyo; the ecommerce data integration is the whole game. If you run a service business (a clinic, a studio, a home-services company, a local retailer, a nonprofit), start with SimpleTexting. If you send fewer than a few hundred texts a month, you can stay on a free tier for now and revisit when you actually need automation.
Our pick: SimpleTexting
The reason SimpleTexting wins for most small businesses is a pricing decision, not a feature. Every paid plan includes the same core capabilities: mass texting, two-way conversations, drip campaigns, MMS, API access, rollover credits, unlimited keywords, and live support. The only thing that changes as you move up the plan ladder is how many messages you can send. That matters because it means the $39 entry plan isn’t a stripped-down teaser. It’s the same product a business on a larger plan is using, sized to a smaller list.
The entry plan starts at $39 per month for 500 outgoing credits, and higher tiers scale up in message volume from there, with enterprise pricing available for larger programs. AI Assist, a built-in SMS copy generator, sits inside the campaign composer on every plan, so you can draft, reword, and tighten messages without bouncing to another tool. Unused credits roll over for one billing cycle before they expire, which is the difference between paying for headroom you might not use and paying for actual sends.
The trade-off is the way SimpleTexting handles teams and integrations. All paid plans come with three user seats, but additional users are $20 per month per seat, and additional numbers are $10 per month each. Native integrations are limited to Mailchimp and Zapier for most workflows, so anything deeper into a CRM or an ecommerce store needs the API or SimpleTexting’s paid custom-integration engineering service. For a small business that mostly needs to blast a promo, run a keyword opt-in, and answer inbound texts from one shared inbox, none of that gets in the way.
The ecommerce pick: Klaviyo
If you already use Klaviyo for email, and if you run a small Shopify store there’s a real chance you do, adding SMS inside the same platform is usually the operationally simplest move. SMS and email share the same customer profile, the same segments, and the same flows. That means an abandoned-cart automation can send an email first, wait, then send a text only to people who didn’t open the email, without a second tool or a Zapier bridge.
Klaviyo’s free plan is genuinely usable to test the water: 250 active profiles, 500 email sends per month, and $5 of mobile messages per month. The free plan also supports the standard library of integrations across major ecommerce platforms and CRMs, so you can wire Klaviyo into your existing tech stack while you’re still evaluating.
The catch is the billing model. Klaviyo bills on “active profiles,” meaning every contact you can still reach, whether you emailed them or not. Aggressive list growth pushes you up a tier the moment you cross it. SMS itself is billed through a separate mobile-messaging plan spend that resets each month with no rollover, and MMS costs more per message than SMS. A single Valentine’s Day campaign with emojis and an image can drain a month’s SMS budget in one push. If SMS becomes your primary channel and email is secondary, a dedicated SMS tool is often the better bet.
The Shopify DTC pick: Postscript
Postscript is what a lot of DTC brands running through Shopify choose when they want SMS to be its own program, not a bolt-on to email. The Starter plan is $0/month with pay-per-message pricing at $0.015 per SMS and $0.045 per MMS in the US and Canada (plus carrier fees), subject to a $49 monthly minimum spend. Growth is $100/month and Professional is $500/month, each stepping down the per-message rate and adding automation, AI tooling, and support. All plans come with a free trial that includes a $100 credit applied toward message and carrier fees during the first 30 days.
The reason to pick Postscript over Klaviyo, if you’re already on Shopify, is depth. Segmentation and triggers pull directly from Shopify data (purchase history, product tags, browse behavior) rather than a generic ecommerce abstraction. Postscript’s Infinity Testing feature lets the AI test hundreds of on-brand message variants for campaigns and automations, which is genuinely useful for a brand running a lot of promos and wanting to squeeze more revenue out of the same list.
Two real limitations. Postscript is Shopify-only, period; if you’re on WooCommerce or BigCommerce it isn’t an option. And the pass-through math on dedicated short codes is real: they cost $750 per month, billed straight through from the carriers with no markup. Most small brands should stick with the free toll-free number Postscript provisions on install.
The budget-friendly starter: EZ Texting
EZ Texting is the platform to look at if the base price is what matters and you want AI-assisted composition on the entry plan. Launch starts at $25 per month (which includes a $5 telecom fee), and inbound messages are free across every tier. AI Compose sits on every plan, along with a native Shutterstock image library, unlimited keywords, contacts, and custom fields, and 10DLC and A2P carrier registration handled at no extra cost. That’s a lot of platform for the price.
The reason it isn’t our top pick is the way costs stack once your team or your volume grows. Additional user seats are $10 per month each on top of the base plan. Unused credits expire after 12 months on annual plans (monthly plans get one billing cycle of rollover). And the plan ladder jumps from Scale ($125/month) to Enterprise ($3,000/month) with no intermediate tier, so a business that outgrows Scale has to negotiate rather than click an upgrade. For a solo operator or a small team that just needs to send campaigns, EZ Texting is fine. For a business that grows fast, plan on switching before you hit the enterprise cliff.
The polished list-marketing tool: SlickText
SlickText’s pitch is that every paid plan gets full access to every feature, including integrations and workflow automations, regardless of plan size. Unused credits roll over for one term following your billing date, and annual plans include two free months of message credits. For a small business with a marketing owner who wants a polished drag-and-drop workflow builder and a clean opt-in and keyword setup, that’s a fair value.
The reason we score it lower than SimpleTexting is the pass-through fee model. SlickText’s help docs are clear that carrier fees are billed separately from the credit bucket at $0.0042 per SMS and $0.0087 per MMS on US 10DLC, toll-free, and short codes as of mid-2026, calculated in arrears each billing period. That’s transparent and fair, but it means the all-in cost is higher than the plan price suggests, and at volume the gap widens. Onboarding help is also gated: a 1-on-1 onboarding session comes with plans starting at $129 per month, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager only ships with 50,000-credit plans and larger. For a first-time sender, that’s worth pricing against SimpleTexting’s included live support before you decide.
How to choose between them
The decision tree is shorter than the table makes it look. If you run a Shopify store and already use Klaviyo for email, add Klaviyo SMS. If you run a Shopify store and want a dedicated SMS program, use Postscript. If you run any other kind of small business (a service company, a nonprofit, a local retailer, a clinic, a studio), start with SimpleTexting on the cheapest plan that covers your volume, and reassess after ninety days. EZ Texting and SlickText are both fine alternatives if their entry price fits your budget better; the differences are real but small.
SMS is one of a few channels where a small business can outrun a much bigger competitor on customer follow-up. It works best in combination with the other things you’re probably already doing to bring customers back: getting more Google reviews (see our guide to AI review management tools for small local businesses), landing pages that actually convert the traffic you paid for (the AI landing page builders we recommend), and, for B2B, cold outreach that stays out of spam (the best AI cold email outreach platforms). Pick one SMS tool from this list, get the welcome message and a monthly promo working, and add complexity only when the revenue justifies it.
