Political texting costs come down to two things: the per-message price and, for peer-to-peer, the people. But the cost that decides whether a program is worth it isn't on the invoice, it's deliverability. Money spent on messages that get filtered is money burned, and you often can't even see the loss. Here's how the real economics work.
How is political texting priced?
Broadcast is priced per message, so cost scales with list size and how often you send. Peer-to-peer adds the cost of the people sending, since a human touches every message, so P2P carries both a per-message component and volunteer or staff labor. A program that runs both formats budgets each separately: broadcast for cheap reach to an opted-in list, P2P for higher-cost, higher-value conversations.
What's the hidden cost?
Deliverability. Unregistered or non-compliant traffic gets filtered by the carriers, and they don't send a refund or a warning, the messages just don't arrive. A campaign can pay full price for a send where a large share never lands, and see it as a content problem instead of a filtering problem. This is why 10DLC registration is a budget line, not a technicality: a cheap send that gets filtered is more expensive than a compliant send that lands, because you paid for messages nobody received.
How should a campaign budget for texting?
Start from volume. Estimate your monthly send volume across broadcast and P2P, price it, and treat registration, Campaign Verify, and compliance tooling as non-negotiable line items rather than corners to cut. The mistake is optimizing for the lowest per-message price and ignoring deliverability, which is optimizing for the wrong number. The right frame is cost per message that actually arrives, and a slightly higher price on a compliant, deliverable sender beats a rock-bottom rate that gets filtered.
Frequently asked questions
How much does political texting cost?
It depends on volume and format. Broadcast is priced per message; P2P adds the cost of the people sending. The bigger variable is deliverability, filtered messages are paid for but never arrive.
Is peer-to-peer more expensive than broadcast?
Per contact, usually, because P2P adds labor on top of the per-message cost. But it delivers conversations and data a broadcast can't, so the higher cost buys higher value for persuasion and voter ID.
Why is deliverability a cost issue?
Because you pay for every message you send, but only the ones that arrive do any work. Unregistered or non-compliant traffic gets filtered silently, so poor deliverability means paying for messages nobody sees.
Keep reading: what 10DLC means for your campaign and political texting benchmarks. For carrier registration, see The Campaign Registry.