T-Mobile has eliminated their one-time Campaign activation fee of $50 indefinitely, retroactive to September 1, 2022 – here’s how it could help you.

This month there was a major update from T-Mobile: the Mobile Network Operator (MNO) has eliminated their one-time Campaign activation fee of $50 indefinitely, retroactive to September 1, 2022. This is absolutely significant for any SaaS business with SMS/MMS who will be establishing new Campaigns under their existing Brands, as well as businesses who have been contemplating moving existing Campaigns to a new messaging API provider. This is because in both cases, you previously were required to pay that one-time activation fee (unless you’re already a Campaign Service Provider!).

To put this into perspective, activating or migrating just 100 Campaigns would cost $5,000 in T-Mobile activation fees alone; at 1,000 Campaigns, $50,000, and so on.

How Does This Impact Switching Messaging Providers?

One reason we’re excited about T-Mobile’s decision to eliminate this fee is that, particularly if you’ve been on the fence with your current API provider, it further reduces the friction of migrating to another. You may be wondering, “...how?”. Well, even if a company is experiencing consistent pain points with their SMS/MMS campaigns, the perception of how time-consuming and costly migrating over to another provider is often makes them feel stuck.

We completely understand how this could seem daunting, but if you’re experiencing low message deliverability, high messaging costs and ambiguous fees, and you’re not getting helpful or efficient customer support, it’s definitely worth looking around. And with T-Mobile’s activation fee out of the picture, switching is that much more approachable!

Here are five questions you should ask any messaging API provider before migrating your traffic:

1) How will you improve my message deliverability? This sounds obvious, but if you’re experiencing issues with deliverability, it’s critical that your provider understands what the cause is and how they’ll be able to troubleshoot for you. Here’s a tip from us: if they don’t do number lookups (check to see who each message recipients’ MNO is), they’re not going to be able to send messages at your max approved throughput rate.

2) What is the full migration timeline for moving all Brands and Campaigns to your platform? Be sure to mention whether your traffic is registered or not for 10DLC numbers, and verified or not for Toll Free numbers. If they don’t require you to get that traffic registered/verified, take that as a major red flag – any provider knows the negative impact this will have on your message deliverability, especially long term.

3) How much engineering work is involved in the migration? We know adding to your engineers’ existing scope can be challenging to say the least, so be sure to clarify how much engineering work is needed throughout the process.

4) What are the costs associated? What are the costs per SMS and MMS on 10DLC, Toll Free, etc.? What are the registration or verification fees?

5) Do you offer multithreading? Multithreading is a great way to test a new provider with just a portion of your traffic, instead of having to move everything over at once. You can experience their onboarding process, test their tech, and decide what’s best for you.

Have questions about the T-Mobile activation fee elimination or how we automated and streamlined our entire onboarding process to take less than one day of engineering work? Let’s chat!