10DLC Registration Cost: Every Fee and How Long Approval Takes

There are two kinds of charge. Registration fees are paid when the brand and the campaign are created. Carrier fees are paid on each message sent. Twilio's pricing article says both are set outside Twilio and passed through with no added cost.

The one-time total on Twilio is the brand fee plus the campaign vetting fee. For a sole proprietor or low-volume standard brand that is 4.50 dollars plus 15 dollars. For a standard brand it is 46 dollars plus 15 dollars, because Twilio's standard brand price includes secondary vetting.

Other providers set their own prices on top of the registry's fees. The figures in this post are Twilio's and HighLevel's because those are the pages we opened. Check your own provider's fee page before you quote a client.

The Campaign Registry publishes a fee guide for the messaging providers that connect to it. The version we read is marked as last updated on 13 August 2026. Its history shows that pricing was updated on 1 August 2025, when Authentication+ pricing was added.

The guide lists brand registration at 4.50 dollars for private, public, non-profit and government brands, and 4.00 dollars for a sole proprietor. Resubmitting brand identity details after a change costs another 4.50 dollars. An appeal of a brand identity result costs 11 dollars.

Vetting is priced per request. A standard vet from either listed vetting partner is 41.50 dollars, and an enhanced vet is 101.50 dollars. The guide lists an Authentication+ vet at 12.50 dollars whether it succeeds or fails, and says a successful one lets a public for-profit brand create campaigns. A failed standard vet is listed at 5 dollars.

The provider itself pays 200 dollars to set up its account with the registry. That is a cost of being a provider, and the guide does not describe it as a charge to each business.

The registry's guide says all campaign fees are charged monthly, per campaign. The use case chosen at registration sets the price, so the choice of use case is also a pricing decision.

Twilio's pricing article lists the same amounts for the tiers it sells: 2 dollars for a sole proprietor campaign, 10 dollars for a standard campaign, 1.50 dollars for low-volume mixed, 3 dollars for charity and 5 dollars for emergency services. It says the fee is billed when the campaign is approved and then every month until the campaign is deactivated or deleted.

Twilio notes a trade for the cheaper tier. A low-volume mixed campaign supports up to 2,000 text segments and picture messages a day toward T-Mobile and gets lower throughput than other use cases, whatever the brand's trust score.

Twilio's campaign vetting FAQ says every campaign registration is reviewed by hand and charged 15 dollars at the time of vetting, for sole proprietor, low-volume standard and standard brands alike. The same page says the fee is not returned if the campaign fails. Twilio's pricing article also warns that the brand fee is charged when the brand is created, even if the brand then sits in an unverified state.

HighLevel's fee article, modified on 10 November 2026, lists one bundled charge that covers the brand, the first campaign and a 3 dollar fast-track fee: 22.50 dollars for sole proprietor and low-volume standard brands and 64 dollars for high-volume standard brands. Each further campaign under the same brand costs 15 dollars. The article says the fees are passed through with no HighLevel markup.

HighLevel's two pages do not fully agree on the monthly fee. The fee article lists 2, 10 and 1.50 dollars. The LC Phone pricing guide, modified on 12 October 2026, lists up to 2.10 dollars for sole proprietor campaigns and up to 10.50 dollars for others. We could not tell which is current, so read the figure shown in the Trust Center at the moment you submit.

Twilio's own pages also disagree in places. Its pricing article lists the sole proprietor brand fee as 4.50 dollars, while its sole proprietor article, updated in May 2026, still says 4 dollars. The pricing article is the more recently updated of the two.

Registration is the smaller cost for any business that sends in volume. Twilio's pricing page lists a base price of 0.0083 dollars for an outbound text segment, and carriers add their own fee to each one. Twilio says volume discounts can apply to its own price but that the carrier fee is the same on every segment.

Twilio's long-code table lists 0.0035 dollars for AT&T, 0.0045 dollars for T-Mobile, 0.005 dollars for Verizon and US Cellular, and 0.0042 dollars for other carriers. HighLevel's LC Phone pricing guide shows the same outbound figures. Picture messages cost more, at 0.009 dollars on AT&T and 0.01 dollars on T-Mobile.

As a worked example, using only those published prices: 1,000 one-segment texts to T-Mobile subscribers on Twilio cost 8.30 dollars in base price and 4.50 dollars in carrier fees, 12.80 dollars in total. A message longer than 160 plain-text characters is split into more segments and each is charged. Twilio says T-Mobile also applies fees to inbound texts.

Twilio's onboarding guide gives a time for each stage. A customer profile may take 72 hours or more. Brand review by the registry typically takes a few minutes, and a brand that goes to manual third-party review takes seven business days or more. Campaign review takes up to five business days for standard use cases, and Twilio asks customers to contact support if a campaign is still pending after ten days.

Some use cases need carrier approval after the registry's review, which adds time. HighLevel sells a fast-track option, included in its bundle, that its fee article says is meant to bring approval within three business days.

Two delays sit outside the review queue. Twilio's documentation says a newly issued tax ID may take 30 to 90 days to reach the databases the registry checks, and that a manual identity appeal typically takes five to seven business days.

None of the pages we read publishes a time for a second review after a rejection. HighLevel's rejection guide says only that a resubmission may need additional carrier review time, so a client launch date should allow for more than one round.

• Customer profile on Twilio: 72 hours or more
• Brand: minutes when automatic, seven business days or more when manual
• Campaign: up to five business days for standard use cases on Twilio
• New tax ID: 30 to 90 days to propagate, per Twilio
• Identity appeal: typically five to seven business days, per Twilio

The rules differ by provider, and they have changed. Twilio says the 15 dollar vetting fee is non-refundable. Its documentation for error 30925 adds that editing the rejected campaign avoids a new vetting fee, while creating a new campaign does not. HighLevel's pricing guide says campaign resubmissions have been free since 1 February 2026, replacing an earlier 15 dollar resubmission fee.

Some charges arrive even when approval was never possible. Bandwidth's vetting guide, dated 20 April 2026, says sole proprietor campaigns submitted through it are rejected automatically and still charged 15 dollars.

Brand corrections have their own prices at the registry: 4.50 dollars to resubmit identity details, 11 dollars to appeal, and 12.50 dollars for each Authentication+ attempt on a public for-profit brand. Twilio says that since 1 August 2025 the Authentication+ fee is charged each time the step has to be retried.

The larger cost is usually the wait. A business that cannot send until its campaign is approved loses the days of each extra review round, and the agency that manages the registration usually absorbs the work.

These totals are arithmetic on the fees above. They assume one brand, one campaign, approval on the first submission and no appeals. They exclude phone number rental and every per-message charge.

A low-volume standard brand with a low-volume mixed campaign pays 4.50 dollars for the brand, 15 dollars for vetting and twelve monthly fees of 1.50 dollars, 37.50 dollars in total. A sole proprietor pays 4.50 dollars, 15 dollars and twelve fees of 2 dollars, 43.50 dollars. A standard brand with one marketing campaign pays 46 dollars, 15 dollars and twelve fees of 10 dollars, 181 dollars.

An agency with forty clients on low-volume mixed campaigns would therefore plan for about 1,500 dollars a year in registration fees across the book, on these prices. The monthly fee keeps running until a campaign is deleted, so campaigns left behind by former clients are worth removing.