Texting in 2023 and Beyond
First, I'd like to introduce myself. I am John Fabrega the Founder/President/CEO of Line1 Communications, Inc. of which TextBox is our primary service offering. Line1 is a small business providing enhanced telecommunications services that I started back in 1994 and currently serves thousands of customers across the US and helps provide a living for multiple families who have loyally worked together for an average of over 10 years. We have no outside investors and have had zero debt for many years until recently due to the factors I’m writing about here.
In the past couple of years, two unfortunate and out of our control circumstances have occurred:
The carrier (Zipwhip) under which TextBox was launched and has grown over the last 10 years was acquired in 2021 (for $880 million!) and and is being shut down near the end of 2023. Through our special relationship with Zipwhip as its first reseller, we have been able to offer text messaging services without worry about traffic volumes. Our customers benefited and we benefited. No other carrier offered that. We are now charged for every text message segment we insert into the network.
The looming shut down has virtually paralyzed our business as we have had to spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars building a new platform that will be virtually immune to any of the 5 providers we now route traffic through being shut down. At the same time, we've spent many more thousands of hours moving customers to the TextBox 2.0 platform as fast as possible in order to be able to continue providing the service our customers have grown to rely upon.Over the last couple of years, the mobile carriers have enacted significant requirements for any business that wants to send texts to their customers. The stated intent is that they want to protect the text messaging ecosystem from going the way of email and fax with spams and scams. Frankly, I applaud that endeavor.
However, it also seems to have presented them with an opportunity for them to make billions by adding surcharges to every text message segment delivered to their customers. Often, these charges exceed the costs charged by the intermediate carriers.
Additionally, we are tasked with the burden of collecting detailed business information and submitting it for seemingly arbitrary verification and vetting which takes considerable non compensated time and costs us for each registration ($4 per attempt), each vetting ($15 per attempt), enhanced vetting ($40) and monthly charges ($1.50 to $10 per month per campaign). We have borne all of these costs multiplied by a couple thousand customers.
As mentioned previously, our primary task has been to build the new platform and keep our customers' traffic flowing. During that time, we have covered all of the expenses and excess charges. Many customers have traffic volumes that have little impact, but many customers have cost us many times more than they are paying. That's on us, but as I'm sure you would agree, that is not a sustainable business practice.
It is for all of the reasons above that in order to keep this business alive, we must change to the industry standard of billing based on usage. In reality, it makes sense -the more you use, the more value it has- but we have all benefited from the old way for a long time. Our current rate plans are here.
Many of our customers now face difficult choices:
Plan to pay for the typical volume they consume.
Change policies and practices. Consider the cost of each message -particularly group messages- and if it is worth sending. Remove recipients who don't want/need to receive the mass texts. Follow these Best Practices.
Find a new provider. I'm confident that our pricing is very competitive and I know that our customer service is unparalleled. When looking at the competition, make sure to let them know how many segments you send per month and find out if carrier surcharges are included. Our pricing includes carrier surcharges.
Stop using text messaging as a way to communicate with customers. Can your emails cut through the clutter of spam in your recipient's email boxes?
Any of those options is available to our customers. We will work with you to support whichever you decide makes the most business sense to your organization.
Most sincerely and respectfully,
John Fabrega
Founder/President/CEO