Key takeaways
- Compare the total cost for your own traffic mix, not one headline price.
- Check whether you pay for messages sent or messages delivered.
- Segments, failures, fees, currency and VAT all change the final amount.
- Cheap routes that deliver poorly cost you in retries, support and lost sign-ups.
What to ask about
| Cost factor | The question to ask |
|---|---|
| Billing basis | Do I pay for messages sent, or only for messages delivered? |
| Segments | How are long messages and Unicode messages counted? |
| Fees around the message | Are there setup, platform, monthly, minimum or support fees? |
| Sender and numbers | What do sender registration and number rental cost? |
| Currency and VAT | In which currency am I billed, and are prices shown with or without VAT? |
| Price changes | How and when can prices change, and with how much notice? |
| Failures and fraud | What happens to cost when traffic fails, or turns out to be fraudulent? |
Sent or delivered
If you pay per message sent, you pay for messages that never arrive. If you pay per delivered message, the provider shares that risk. Read the definition of “delivered” in the agreement, since it decides which messages count.
The costs that are not on the price list
- Retries and duplicate sends when a route is weak
- Support time spent on missing codes
- Lost sign-ups and abandoned carts when a code arrives late
- Engineering time for each provider-specific quirk
- Fraud such as artificially inflated traffic, if nothing limits it
How to build a fair comparison
- Use your own mix of countries, channels and message lengths
- Convert all prices to one currency, and to the same VAT basis
- Include every fee for a typical month
- Add the cost of failures using real delivery data from a pilot
- Compare the result per delivered message, not per quote
How ZafeConnect fits
ZafeConnect charges only for delivered messages, with no setup, system or operating fees and no subscription. The list prices per message by country are published in DKK and EUR, excluding VAT, and large volumes and enterprise agreements get a tailored offer.