From SMS utility to automation platform

TextMagic has sold pay-as-you-go business texting since 2001, when Textmagic Ltd was set up in the UK. For most of that time the pitch was simple: buy credit, upload a list, send. Summer 2026 changed that: an MCP connector for Claude and ChatGPT in July, an AI automation builder on August 10, and Shopify and form triggers on September 7.

The company's own Q2 2026 results, published on July 7, show why. SMS volume rose 21% and revenue per user rose 12%, but active users fell 4%, a drop the group put down "mainly" to "low-volume and price-sensitive users". Revenue for the quarter was €3.52m, up 7%. Read plainly: TextMagic is earning more from teams that send a lot and losing the occasional sender who shops on price. That tells you who the product is being built for now.

What a text actually costs

Billing is 100% prepaid. The Essential option is pure pay-as-you-go; Professional is a monthly plan with a discounted rate, offered only in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico, the UK and Australia. TextMagic does not publish Professional's tiers in a form we could read, so the figures below are Essential's, checked on the pricing page and billing help article in September 2026.

Segment counting matters more than the headline rate. A plain message fits 160 characters; the 161st makes it two texts, and each joined part holds only 153. One emoji or curly quote switches the whole message to Unicode, where a part holds 70 characters. So a 150-character promo with a single smiley bills as three texts, not one. The compose screen shows a live characters and parts counter, which is worth watching before every send.

Third-party trackers report the rate stepping down with volume, to about 2 cents at 100,000 messages; TextMagic does not confirm that, and says it does not price-match.

A worked example

Take a US shop sending 1,000 single-part texts a month. On TextMagic Essential it is about $49 in messages plus $10 for the number plus $10 for the 10DLC campaign: roughly $69 a month. The same volume on Twilio is about $8.30 at $0.0083 per segment, around $4 in carrier fees and $1.15 for the number, plus Twilio's own 10DLC registration fees. That is well under a quarter of the cost, but Twilio gives you an API and nothing a marketer can log into. SimpleTexting charges $39 a month billed yearly for 500 credits, with extra credits at 5.5 cents, which lands close to TextMagic at this volume and gives you a predictable bill instead of a balance to watch.

TextMagic's per-message rate is roughly six times Twilio's base rate, or four times once carrier fees are counted. What the difference buys is the web app, the shared inbox, the automations and a setup with no code at all. The $0.01 bring-your-own-number route is the interesting exception: a team already on Twilio can keep its carrier pricing and still hand the inbox to non-technical staff.

The US registration toll

American senders cannot text from a local number until a 10DLC brand and campaign are approved. TextMagic pays the one-time registration fees, and since April 2026 it pre-fills the brand and campaign forms with AI. Approval still takes somewhere between 7 and 15 business days by its own help page, and afterwards the campaign costs $10 a month for as long as you use it. A registered local number therefore costs $20 a month before a single message goes out.

Toll-free is the cheaper door: verification is free and usually takes up to five business days. It is strict, though. Applications without a working website URL, a screenshot of the opt-in, or STOP/HELP and frequency wording get rejected, and pre-checked consent boxes are an automatic fail. One Trustpilot reviewer in February 2026 complained that TextMagic's screening was overly conservative and pushed them toward toll-free instead of 10DLC.

In the UK and Australia you can send from an alphanumeric Sender ID, your brand name instead of a number, at $10 a month with approval taking up to 14 days. Recipients cannot reply to it, which rules it out for anything conversational.

Your balance is your account

This is the part of TextMagic most likely to cause real damage. Number and Sender ID subscriptions do not renew from your card. They are deducted from your credit balance, and if the balance is too low, TextMagic "reserve[s] the right to cancel it permanently". Let the credit run dry in a quiet month and the number your customers have saved can be gone.

That is also why auto-recharge is switched on for you, and why you can only turn it off after cancelling every number and Sender ID. A Trustpilot reviewer in October 2023 objected to an auto top-up they said they never agreed to. The smallest top-up is 20 in USD, EUR, AUD or GBP.

The friendlier details: Essential credit never expires, and you can request a refund of unused credit, paid to the original method within seven business days, with no cancellation fee. Two asterisks apply. Professional credit rolls over for only about two months. And the terms let TextMagic close an account after 24 months without use, with no refund of what is left on it, so "never expires" really means "never expires while you keep texting".

Automations, AI and the shared inbox

The automation builder is now the best reason to pick TextMagic over a raw API. You describe the flow ("text new Shopify customers a welcome code, then a review request after a week") and the AI drafts the steps. Flows can jump back to an earlier step, run only within a date range, save a reply into a contact field and show a per-contact log with a retry button when something fails. Triggers now include contact created or updated, form submissions and Shopify orders.

The MCP connector lets you ask Claude or ChatGPT to send a text or check replies. TextMagic says the assistant always previews the cost and asks for confirmation before sending, which is the right default for anything that spends money. Point AI, a separate feature, suggests replies inside a chat drawn from your own knowledge base; TextMagic does not list its price clearly, so check before relying on it.

The shared inbox gathers SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and live chat conversations with internal notes, tickets and role-based permissions. Bulk campaigns, however, are SMS and email only. If you want to broadcast on WhatsApp, this is not the tool. For email-first marketing that also sends texts, Brevo or Omnisend are the better fit.

Teams, support and what users complain about

Seats are free and unlimited. That is unusual: SMS platforms often price per user, and here a ten-person support team costs the same as one person.

Phone support runs 06:00 to 23:00 UTC on weekdays and 09:00 to 15:00 UTC at weekends, with US, UK and Australian numbers, alongside live chat and same-working-day ticket replies. For US readers, 23:00 UTC is 7pm Eastern in summer and 4pm Pacific, so late-afternoon West Coast problems wait for chat or email.

Ratings are strong: 4.7 out of 5 from 298 reviews on Trustpilot and 4.6 from 260 on Capterra, checked in September 2026. The complaints that recur are about price rather than reliability. A Capterra reviewer in 2025 called it limited and expensive next to competitors, another wanted a search function in chats, and one US user found it unavailable in parts of the country. Older Trustpilot reviews mention texts marked delivered that recipients never saw, and a UK user who resented Sender IDs going from free to £120 a year.

Verdict: who should buy it, and who should skip it

Buy TextMagic if you are a small or mid-sized team that wants two-way texting, reminders and simple automations without hiring a developer, and you value free unlimited seats and credit that does not expire while you keep using it. The trial needs no card and includes a first month free on the number, plus 0.5 credit, which is about ten test texts.

Skip it if you send tens of thousands of messages a month and have a developer: Twilio's $0.0083 per segment will save you most of your bill. Skip it too if you want a fixed monthly price with bundled credits, where SimpleTexting's $39 plan is easier to budget. And if you already run a Twilio or Bandwidth account, consider the middle path: connect it to TextMagic at $0.01 a text and get the app without the markup.

Whichever way you go, set a low-balance alert. On TextMagic, an empty balance can cost you your number.

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