Key takeaways
- The price per sent message and the price per delivered message are two different numbers. The second is the one that counts in the budget.
- Delivery depends on the route, the destination and the operator, so test your own countries.
- Ask for delivery reports per message and per operator, and check what “delivered” means.
- Include fees and volume tiers before you compare list prices.
Who is cheapest on bulk SMS with good delivery?
There is no single answer, because price and delivery vary with country, operator, time and message type. A provider can be cheap to Denmark and expensive to Asia, and the other way round. What you can do is calculate the price per delivered message in your own countries.
A price per sent message only tells you what it costs to send, not what you get for the money. If the route delivers poorly, you pay for messages that never arrive, and for retries, support and lost customers afterwards.
Price per sent or per delivered message?
The price per delivered message is the price per sent message divided by the share that is delivered. The table is a worked example with made-up numbers and does not describe any particular provider.
The provider that looks most expensive on the list can therefore be the cheapest in operation, and the other way round. If you pay only for delivered messages, the calculation has moved over to the provider, but then you need to read the definition of “delivered” in the agreement.
| Worked example | Price per sent | Delivered | Price per delivered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider A | 0.30 DKK | 75% | 0.40 DKK |
| Provider B | 0.34 DKK | 95% | 0.36 DKK |
What decides delivery besides the price?
Five things explain most of the difference between two providers with the same list price:
- The route: the number of links between the provider and the operator, and whether the route has an agreement with the operator
- The sender: how your sender name is treated in each country
- Retries and failover when a route fails, and whether you can see what happened
- Content and filters, which can block certain texts or links
- Delivery reports: whether they come per message, how fast, and how many are left as unknown
What does it cost to send A2P SMS as an enterprise?
The price per message depends on the destination, the channel and the volume, and for large volumes it is often a quote and not a fixed rate. That is why you need to compare on the same basis and ask about everything outside the message price. Our article on what messaging really costs goes through the fees in detail.
Ask in particular about these points:
- Volume tiers: at what volumes does the price fall, do the tiers apply per month or per country, and do you lose the discount if volume drops?
- Fees: setup, platform, minimum spend, support and subscription
- Sender and numbers: the price of registration and rental
- Currency and VAT: prices in your currency, and whether they are with or without VAT
- Price changes: how they can happen and with what notice
How to test price and delivery together
Run the same traffic through each provider, and do the arithmetic afterwards. The pilot can be short if it is well defined:
- Use the same text and the same sender with every provider
- Pick the three to five countries that matter most to you, and run on the same days
- Measure the delivery rate per country and operator from the delivery reports, and look at time to delivered
- Count how many messages are left as unknown, and what they cost you
- Calculate the price per delivered message, including fees and retries, and compare it
How ZafeConnect fits
ZafeConnect publishes list prices per message and country in DKK and EUR, excluding VAT. Denmark is 0.275 DKK per message for SMS and basic RCS (about €0.04). The list prices 140 destinations, ZafeConnect reaches 190+ countries, and large volumes and enterprise agreements get a tailored offer.
You pay for delivered messages, with no setup, system or operating fees and no subscription. ZafeConnect reports a message delivery rate of over 98%. That is a reported rate and not a guarantee, so measure it yourself in a pilot.