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Textline's pricing plans are easy to understand. Right? After all, the Textline pricing is publicly available.
Well, that seems to be the case until you start adding agents, phone numbers, and message credits.
The Textline platform markets itself as a business communication tool built for growing businesses. However, when you dig into the fine print, you'll find additional fees, limitations, and an absence of calling features.
Here's what you need to know before you commit.
Also read: iPlum vs. Textline—Which is the Best for Business Texting and Calling?
Table of Contents
1. How much does Textline cost?
2. 9 things you need to know about Textline pricing
3. iPlum: the best Textline alternative
4. iPlum vs Textline: the numbers side by side
5.Textline pricing: is it worth it?
How much does Textline cost?
Textline offers three pricing plans — Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise.
Here's what you get with each plan:
Essentials plan
This is Textline's base plan. It comes with 3 agents, 1 phone number, and 600 message credits per month. Additional agents cost $50 per agent per month, and extra phone numbers run $15 monthly each.
Note: Textline pricing doesn't publish a flat monthly base fee for Essentials — you'll need to contact the sales team for a personalized quote.
Pro plan
The Pro plan gives you 5 agents, 2 phone numbers, and 2,000 message credits per month. Additional agents cost $70 per agent per month. Extra phone numbers are still $15 per month each.
Enterprise plan
The Enterprise is negotiable. The agent count, phone numbers, and message volume are all built around custom pricing. You'll need to contact Textline's sales team to get up-to-date information on what the plan costs and what it covers.
Note: The Textline HIPAA-compliant plans carry different base fees from standard plans. Textline requires you to contact their sales team for up-to-date information on HIPAA-compliant pricing.
On top of your subscription, you'll also pay industry-wide registration fees and messaging costs that vary based on usage.
9 things you need to know about Textline pricing
Textline pricing looks straightforward on paper. But once you get into the details, you'll notice a pattern — the more your business grows, the more you'll pay.
Here are 9 things you need to know:
1. Textline is a texting tool — and that's all it will ever be
Textline doesn't offer calling. In fact, their own FAQ confirms it: "We don't provide voice functionality for our Textline numbers."
What they do text enable is call forwarding, which means incoming calls get redirected to a forwarding number you already own. However, that's not a calling feature but a workaround.
For any business owner running a practice, a sales operation, or multiple departments, this is a bottleneck.
First, your clients expect to call you. Besides, customer communication doesn't stop at text messages. In addition, when a patient calls their healthcare provider or a customer needs to sort out a billing issue, a text thread won't cut it.
Sure, Textline offers solid business texting tools. But if your business needs both calling and texting, you'll pay for Textline and a separate calling solution on top of it.
2. The base plan comes with fine print that's hard to notice
The Essentials plan looks like a reasonable base plan. You get three agents, one phone number, and 600 message credits per month. Until you read the fine print.
First, Textline pricing doesn't publish a flat base fee for the Essentials plan. You'll need to reach out to the sales team for a personalized quote.
Second, the moment your fourth agent joins, you're paying an extra $50 per month. Add a second phone number for a new department, and that's another $15. Simply put, messaging costs pile on separately based on message volume.
The Essentials tier is also a limited plan.
You don't get basic features like custom surveys, smart SMS, and timer automations. To unlock those, you'll need to upgrade to Pro, where additional agents jump to $70 per agent per month.
3. You'll need to pay extra for HIPAA compliance
Textline HIPAA-compliant tiers aren't available at standard plan prices. On the flip side, Textline requires you to contact their sales team to get up to date information on what HIPAA compliant pricing costs.
For healthcare providers and their business partners, this is a significant detail.
Data security and patient consent aren't optional extras; they're legal requirements. Yet on the Textline platform, meeting those requirements means paying a different, higher base fee on top of your existing subscription.
Furthermore, the Essentials plan also has limitations specific to HIPAA. It doesn't allow bulk consent requests, meaning you have to request patient consent from contacts individually. To get around that, you'll need the Pro HIPAA plan, which carries its own separate, undisclosed fee.
The point is, secure messaging and data protection should come standard for any platform targeting regulated industries.
4. You'll likely exhaust message credits fast
The Essentials plan gives you 600 message credits per month. That sounds adequate until you factor in MMS messages.
Each MMS message costs 3 message credits. So when you send 200 multimedia messages in a month, you'll have burned through your entire allowance.
And, once you exhaust your included credits, Textline charges $0.03 per credit for add-on credits. When you run out of those, too, backup credits kick in automatically at $0.04 each. The catch is, you can only purchase add-on credits once per billing cycle.
For any business doing high-volume messaging, bulk messages, or running SMS marketing campaigns, 600 credits deplete fast. Even the Pro plan's 2,000 credits won't last long if you're sending mass messages or running the announcements feature regularly.
Messaging costs on Textline aren't fixed. They shift every month based on usage, making it hard to predict your actual bill.
Textline FAQs acknowledge this. The service advises customers to contact their team for up-to-date information on costs.
5. Every additional phone number adds to your monthly bill
The Essentials and Pro pricing plans charge $15 per month for every additional phone number.
For businesses operating across multiple locations or multiple departments — think a medical practice with separate lines for billing, appointments, and referrals — those $15 charges stack up fast. Three extra numbers translate to $45 more per month, every month, on top of everything else.
Textline lets you use your own number in most cases. However, there's a catch. If you port a cell phone number to Textline, it loses voice functionality and the ability to send texts from the phone's native app.
For businesses that need multiple departments on separate lines, the Textline cost grows with every number added.
6. Adding agents on Pro gets expensive quickly
The Pro plan starts with 5 agents. The moment you need a sixth, you're paying $70 more per month. A tenth agent brings your additional per agent cost to $350 per month on top of whatever the base Pro plan costs.
For a business owner managing a growing customer support operation, those numbers add up fast. A 10-person operation on Pro could be looking at hundreds of dollars in per agent fees alone, before factoring in phone numbers, message credits, or messaging costs.
Compare that to the Essentials plan, where additional agents cost $50 each. The jump to $70 on Pro is a 40% increase per agent. The more your operation grows, the steeper the Textline cost gets.
Sure, Textline offers custom pricing at the Enterprise level. However, to get there, you'll need to contact sales, negotiate, and wait for a personalized quote.
7. Essentials caps your conversation history at 3 years
The Essentials plan stores your three-year conversation history. For most businesses, three years sounds like plenty. However, it isn't for everyone.
Healthcare providers, legal firms, financial services businesses, and insurance companies regularly need records going back further than three years. Data protection regulations in these industries don't follow a three-year window.
If your industry requires long-term record retention, the Essentials plan puts you in a difficult position. You'll either upgrade to Pro — at a higher per-agent cost — or export and store records manually, which creates its own administrative burden.
8. Good support costs more than you'd expect
The Essentials and Pro plans come with basic customer support. However, a dedicated customer success manager is reserved for Enterprise customers only.
For a small or mid-sized business paying significant per-agent fees on the Pro plan, that's a frustrating reality. You're paying premium plans pricing but getting basic-level support.
It means that if you run into a technical issue or need help configuring agent roles, automated responses, or internal notes, you may not have adequate help
Priority support is only at the Enterprise level, which requires negotiation and a personalized quote.
If your business depends on customer communication and can't afford downtime, the gap between what you pay and the support you receive on Essentials and Pro is worth factoring into your decision.
9. That $15 monthly registration fee never goes away
If you use a 10-digit long code number on Textline, you'll pay a $15 campaign fee every single month.
Textline requires all customers using 10DLC numbers to register with The Campaign Registry, and that registration comes with an ongoing monthly cost.
The fee is completely outside your subscription. It's separate from your per-agent charges, message credits, and additional fees for phone numbers or messaging costs.
The only way out is to switch to a toll-free number, which currently carries no monthly registration fee. But toll-free numbers aren't the right fit for every business.
A local area code builds trust with local customers. And for businesses that text-enable local numbers, the $15 charge is simply a permanent line item.
iPlum: the best Textline alternative
There’s more to Textline's limitations than missing features. The pricing structure is noticeably steep, especially when Textline alternatives like iPlum offer more for significantly less.
Here’s what you get with iPlum
Calling and texting in one platform
iPlum gives you a dedicated business phone number that handles both calling and texting. You don't need workarounds, forwarding numbers, or a second app.
The Standard plan at $8.99/user per month covers calling, texting, voicemail, a phone tree, and auto-text reply. That's a complete business communication setup.
For businesses that need robust communication features, the Professional plan at $14.99/user per month adds web calling, secure, encrypted texting, group text, scheduled messages, and voicemail transcription.
Meanwhile, healthcare providers get HIPAA compliance and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) on the Professional plan at no extra charge.
The Enterprise plan at $25.99/user per month adds call recording, recording consent announcements, and 10-year text archiving. That's the kind of complex communication coverage that regulated industries need.
Textline doesn't offer any of this—a business owner on Textline who needs calling pays for Textline and a separate VoIP solution. On iPlum, calling is part of the plan from day one.
HIPAA compliance without the extra bill
On Textline, HIPAA-compliant pricing is separate, undisclosed, and requires a call to their sales team. iPlum, by comparison, offers HIPAA compliance with the Professional plan at $14.99/user per month.
The price covers secure messaging, secure texting, data protection, and a BAA. With iPlum, healthcare providers don't need to negotiate a separate contract or pay a different base fee to meet their compliance obligations.
iPlum also handles patient consent and secure, encrypted texting on both the mobile app and a web-based portal, meaning patients can communicate securely without downloading anything.
For any business in a regulated industry — healthcare, legal, or financial services — data security shouldn't come at a premium. And on iPlum, it doesn't.
Transparent pricing that doesn't punish growth
iPlum publishes its prices.
All three plans are listed publicly — $8.99, $14.99, and $25.99 per user per month. You don't need to call sales, negotiate, or wait for a personalized quote.
Textline pricing hides its base fees behind a contact form. However, with iPlum, what you see is what you pay.
Moreover, adding users on iPlum doesn't trigger a tiered penalty either. On Textline's Pro plan, every additional agent costs $70 per month.
If you're running multiple departments or multiple locations, iPlum's consistency makes budgeting predictable. You'll never have to worry about backup credits, per-number additional fees, or surprise charges tied to message volume.
iPlum also covers incoming messages at no extra charge. Textline charges for every incoming message, which can quietly inflate your messaging costs month after month.
iPlum vs Textline: the numbers side by side
Let's compare the numbers between the two platforms for a 10-person operation that needs HIPAA compliance, calling, texting, and adequate message volume.
The difference is stark.
iPlum gives a 10-person operation calling and texting, HIPAA compliance, a BAA, secure messaging, and voicemail transcription for $149.90/month.
Textline can't match that, and it doesn't offer calling at any price.
Textline pricing: is it worth it?
Indeed, Textline has its strength as a business texting platform. It gives you a unified inbox, automated responses, message scheduling, and agent availability.
If all your business needs is a text message marketing service with group messaging and the ability to assign conversations, it can be a solid pick.
However, the Textline pricing structure has limitations you can ignore.
First, the platform doesn’t publish its base fees. In addition, HIPAA-compliant plans cost extra. Besides, Textline doesn’t support calling. And the bill grows every time you add an agent, a number, or exceed your message volume.
iPlum offers calling, texting, HIPAA compliance, a BAA, secure messaging, and long-term archiving at a published, predictable price.
So if your business needs robust communication features and compliance coverage without the unpredictable billing, iPlum is a good Textline alternative.
Click the link below to get started with iPlum
