We just dropped our SMS prices: Here’s why we did it

I’m going to skip the whole announcement schtick, where I would build up the tension, and just say it: Omnisend just lowered its SMS prices. In the US, it now starts at $0.007 per message, depending on sending volume.

I see many other platforms raising their prices, so we went the other way. On purpose and unapologetically.

And it’s not like I need to justify it to you now, but I do want to explain why. Because I think it says something important about where SMS is headed and how we think about our relationship with the brands that use Omnisend.

SMS is essential, not experimental

For a long time, SMS was treated like a bonus channel. You’d bolt it on when you felt ready, when you had budget left over, when you’d “figured out email first.” A lot of brands are still in that mindset.

But the data says they should move on.

Our 2026 Ecommerce Marketing Report analyzed 321 million SMS messages sent by over 150,000 brands in 2025. SMS volume grew by an impressive 40% year over year. SMS click rates more than doubled. And automated SMS messages, triggered by customer behavior, generated an average of $0.74 per send, compared to just $0.15 for standard campaigns.

If that’s not a revenue engine, I don’t know what is.

SMS works because it’s immediate and personal in a way that no other channel is. We keep our phones nearby most of the time. We notice the notifications. And when it comes to SMS, we often also read them within minutes. 

Not many channels can offer this kind of directness. Not even email. And definitely not in ads.

If you’re one of the brands that figured this out early – congrats on building on that advantage. But I’m always wondering, why haven’t more brands followed yet?

Will it pay off?

I’m not going to pretend that SMS adoption has been frictionless. The per-message cost of SMS has been a real hesitation, especially if you’re a smaller ecommerce brand. 

You’re already spending on email. You’re already spending on ads. Now you get the pressure of adding another channel with a variable cost, which scales with your sends. In such a case, you must have a lot of confidence that ROI will follow. 

But we’ve seen that confidence pay off for the brands that committed. 

Kate Backdrop sells photography supplies globally. They combined SMS flash sales, push notifications, and automated workflows into a single omnichannel program and walked away with a 1:300 ROI.

CLVmaxers, a boutique retention agency in our Partner Program, took on a client called Rockin Royalty and rebuilt their email and SMS system from scratch. Six months later, open rates went from under 15% to over 65%.

We also have Vagari Bags, a boutique travel accessories brand, that added SMS alongside their email workflows. They hit 6-7% click rates with a 1:121 ROI on SMS campaigns. 

The beauty of it all is that there aren’t edge cases. This happens to brands every day when they decide to use SMS strategically inside a proper automation stack and treat it as a real channel.

So we lowered the price, because it was the right move

Omnisend is customer-funded, so when they win, we win. That means every business decision we make has to hold up against one question: does this work for the people using the platform?

When brands pay less per SMS, they send more. When they send more, they make more money. When they make more money, they stay and grow with us. None of this is complicated. 

So lowering those prices wasn’t charity or a flash sale. It simply made sense for us.

And if I’m being completely honest, we could do it. The scale we’ve reached and the infrastructure we’ve built gave us the room to make this move without cutting corners on the product or the support team. So we did.

Some platforms raise prices because they can. We lowered ours for the same reason.

And it’s not lost on me that it’s not a small thing to do. In an industry where the default move is to protect margins at the customer’s expense, going the other way takes a certain kind of confidence. We have that confidence.

What this means for you

So what does all of this mean for you? Depends on where you are right now.

• If you’ve been thinking about SMS but haven’t started yet, this is the moment. Prices start at $0.007 per message. The channel works, the ROI is there. And the bill is no longer the reason to wait.
• If you’re already sending SMS with us, nothing changes unless you want it to. But it’s worth taking five minutes to look at the new rates. If you’re on our legacy Pro plan, the new per-message rates are around 50% lower — and our pricing calculator will tell you pretty quickly whether switching makes sense for your volume.

Not sure which situation applies to you? Our amazing support team is there to walk you through it.

And if you’re currently on a platform that recently went the other direction on pricing, we built a migration process that takes less than 5 days. We’ll handle the move for you.