What it costs, and what it doesn’t do yet

The price

Your texting sits outside it and never passes through me — what a text really costs in Ontario is further down this page.

Texting costs money, and it is not the number on the price list

Every quote you have seen for business texting in Canada is a sticker rate. The sticker rate is about half of what you will pay. Nobody tells you the other half until the first bill, so here it is before you sign.

What a text actually costs in Ontario

The carrier your customer happens to be on adds a per-segment fee on top of the messaging rate. It is charged to you, it is not optional, and it is different for every network.

Budget two cents a segment, not eight tenths of one. On a mixed Ontario book the all-in cost lands between about 1.5¢ and 2.4¢, depending whose network answers. Roughly double the advertised rate, every time.

Those are published rates, not my invoice, and carriers move them. Treat the shape as the durable part — the pass-through is real, it is per segment, and it roughly doubles the sticker — and treat the third decimal place as something to check on the day you sign. Your own bill is the only figure that settles it, and it comes from your provider, not from me.

At a hundred texts a month nobody notices the difference. At a campaign to your whole list it is the difference between a rounding error and a line on your P&L, and it is the moment operators find out the number they planned with was the wrong one.

A segment is not a message

You are billed per segment, and a segment is 160 characters of plain text. One emoji, one curly apostrophe or one em dash flips the whole message to a different encoding and the segment shrinks to 70 characters — so a message that fit in one can silently cost three.

CrewDocket counts this as you type, tells you which encoding you are in and which character caused it, and shows the segment count before you press send. That is not a feature I built for the brochure; it is there because it was costing me money.

It does not send pictures

CrewDocket sends no picture messages at all. Every text it sends is plain SMS, and there is no path in it that attaches a photo to an outgoing message — not a before-and-after, not a quote as an image, nothing. If a customer sends you a picture it arrives in the thread and is kept. It only goes one way.

Two reasons, and the second is the honest one. Picture messages cost several times an SMS segment and are the line that quietly wrecks a texting bill. And I haven’t built it. Your quotes and invoices go out as links instead, which is better anyway — a link can be opened, accepted and paid, and a picture can only be looked at. If you need to send photos to a customer today, you send them from your own phone.

The wait nobody warns you about

Before a business can text customers from a real number, that number has to be registered with the carriers — the A2P 10DLC process. It is paperwork about your business, your brand and the kind of messages you intend to send, and the carriers review it.

It runs for weeks, not minutes. Registrations get rejected for small things and go back in the queue. Until it clears, business texting from your own number does not work — and no amount of paying faster makes a carrier answer sooner.

The money part is small and I’ll name it anyway: registering your business costs about $4 one-time, and registering the kind of messages you send costs about $15 one-time. Those are the carrier’s charges, on your own messaging account, and they are not what makes this the hard part of your setup. The queue is. It is the only thing in getting you started that neither of us can hurry, which is why it is the first thing we do rather than the last.

1. Day one of your setup call We start the registration. First thing, before anything else, because it is the only part of the setup with a clock somebody else controls.
2. While it is in the queue You use everything else. Scheduling, quotes, invoices, payments, crew pay, photos and your whole book work from the first day — none of it waits on a carrier.
3. When it clears Two-way texting switches on and the message threads start filling in. Nothing is sent to any of your customers before that moment, and nothing is sent by itself afterwards either.

Whose bill it is

The number is registered to your business and the messaging account is in your name, on your card. Your texting cost is separate from whatever CrewDocket costs and it does not pass through me, so there is no margin on it for me to defend and no reason for me to be vague about it.

If two cents a segment changes whether this works for you, say so on the call and we will do the arithmetic on your actual list before you commit to anything.

The three things that are usually in the small print

There is no contract.

Month to month. You stop when you want to stop, by telling me. There is no cancellation flow to find, because there is no billing system to hide one in.

The founding price is locked, and locking it costs me, not you.

The first ten businesses keep whatever they start at, for as long as they stay. If the price goes up it goes up for people who arrive later. That is the whole trade: you take a risk on software that has one customer, and you never pay the price that gets set once it has fifty.

Your book is yours the entire time.

One button in settings writes your whole book — clients, jobs, invoices, quotes, leads, payments, crew and payouts — to a file on your own computer. It runs in the browser off data the app already has, so it does not need my permission and it cannot be switched off for non-payment. Your job photos are the one thing not inside that file; ask and I send them with the rest. The long version, including what the file actually is, is in the questions.