How we rate SMS providers
The six criteria behind every score on this site, where each figure comes from, and what we do not do: we do not open accounts or send test traffic.
Reader-supported. We earn a commission when you sign up with a provider through this site. Commission never affects a score or a position. How we make money.
What we measure
Every provider gets one score out of 10. It is built from six things, each of which is a figure somebody has published, not an impression.
| Criterion | What it measures | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Published cents per outbound SMS at 1K, 15K, 125K, 250K messages a month, plus the monthly cost of a dedicated virtual mobile number and any setup fee. | The published pricing page, read on a dated visit. |
| Numbers and sender types | Whether there is a dedicated virtual mobile number, a shared number and an alphanumeric sender ID, and what each costs. | The pricing and product pages. |
| Sending methods | REST API, SMPP, email to SMS, two-way replies, and the documented integrations. | The developer documentation. |
| Routes | What the provider states about its connections to Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. | The provider claim, quoted. Carrier relationships cannot be verified from outside. |
| Reliability | The uptime figure or service level published, and whether it carries remedies. | The SLA or status page. |
| Support | Channels, hours, whether support is Australian, and whether it is 24/7 or business hours. | The contact and support pages. |
What each criterion is worth
The weights are not published yet. They will be, as a table on this page that sums to 100, at the next scoring round. Until then this page states what is measured and not what each part contributes, because a weights table invented to look tidy is worse than an honest gap.
What can be said today: price carries the most weight of the six, because it is the figure a buyer can act on and the one nearly every provider publishes. Routes carries the least, because it rests on a claim rather than on a measurement.
What we do not do
We do not open accounts and we do not send test traffic. Nothing on this site is a hands-on test, and no page says it is. What we publish instead is what the provider publishes, with the date we read it, so you can check it.
This has a cost worth naming. We cannot tell you how a delivery rate behaves in practice, how long support actually takes to answer, or whether an API is pleasant to work with. Where those matter, a free trial will tell you more than we can.
We also do not score a provider on a criterion it publishes nothing for. The field is left blank on the review rather than filled with a zero, because those mean different things.
Who is scored, and who is not
We review 24 brands. 9 of them trade under the name we review them under and publish a per-message rate in Australian dollars that maps onto a monthly volume, and those 9 are the priced comparison. A further 4 publish an Australian delivery rate in US cents. We neither convert those nor sort them against a column of Australian ones, because a converted price is not a published price and is wrong again the next time the exchange rate moves; they are named under the tables with their currency instead. The remaining 11 price on prepaid credit or a monthly plan rather than on volume, publish no rate at all, or have been renamed, absorbed or withdrawn since we first reviewed them. The reason is printed beside each one, because ranking a provider that publishes no price against ones that do is a comparison with a hole in it.
Rates were last checked against the providers' own pages on 9 September 2026.
Independence
Some providers pay a commission when a reader signs up through a link here. That is how the site is funded and it is disclosed on every page that carries such a link.
Commission does not affect a score or a position. The score comes from the criteria above, applied the same way to a provider that pays nothing and a provider that pays something. No provider has been offered a position, and none has been removed for declining one.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source and correct it with a dated note. Send a correction.