Attentive does not publish pricing. There is no rate card, no public tier, and no self-serve signup, so every Attentive price is a negotiated quote. Anyone who gives you a definitive figure is either repeating their own contract or guessing. What you can pin down is the shape of the bill and the levers that move it.
- An Attentive agreement is typically an annual platform commitment invoiced monthly, with message and carrier costs bundled into the negotiated number.
- Three inputs move a quote more than anything else: subscriber count, annual send volume, and contract length.
- Carrier pass-through fees apply on every provider and are unavoidable, so ask whether they sit inside the quote or arrive on top of it.
- To sanity-check a quote, price the same volume against a published rate. Postscript lists platform fees of $0 to $500 a month and roughly $0.007 to $0.009 per SMS, which gives you a floor to negotiate against.
Attentive does not publish pricing. No rate card, no public tier list, no self-serve signup. If you are here because you searched for a number and every result gave you a range with no source, that is why. This page gives you the next best thing, which is the structure of the bill, the levers that move it, and a published rate to measure a quote against.
I have negotiated SMS platform contracts as the operator paying for them, and I have paid the carrier fees that arrive underneath. So this is written from the buyer's side of the table rather than the vendor's. Attentive is a serious company running a strong managed program. The opacity is a commercial choice, not a flaw, and understanding why they make it is most of your leverage.
Attentive does not
publish pricing. That
is deliberate.
There is no pricing page, no rate card, and no way to sign up and start sending without talking to a salesperson. Every Attentive price is a negotiated quote, sized to your business.
That is a deliberate commercial choice rather than an oversight. Managed-service vendors price on what a program is worth to the customer rather than on units consumed, and publishing a rate destroys that flexibility. A brand sending two million messages a year and a brand sending twenty million are worth very different amounts to Attentive, and a single public number would leave money on the table at one end and lose deals at the other.
The practical consequence for you: anyone quoting a definitive Attentive price is either repeating their own contract or making it up. Treat every range you find in a third-party post, including ranges that look precise, as one anonymous brand's deal at one point in time, on a volume and term you cannot see.
Every SMS bill has
three layers. Attentive
bundles two of them.
You cannot compare a quote to a rate card until both are broken into the same parts. Every SMS platform charges some mix of the same three things.
Layer one, the platform fee. The monthly subscription for the software: sending engine, automations, segmentation, list growth, analytics. Buyers fixate on this layer and it is usually the smallest of the three at real volume.
Layer two, the per-message rate. What you pay for each text sent. This is where volume shows up, and at scale it dwarfs the platform fee.
Layer three, carrier pass-through. The mobile carriers charge a fee on every message crossing their networks, separate from your platform rate. This applies on every provider and is unavoidable. It is also the layer brands forget when they budget.
Attentive folds layers one and three into a single negotiated commitment, which is what makes it hard to compare against a published per-message rate.
| Cost layer | Attentive | A published comparison (Postscript) |
|---|---|---|
Platform fee | Not published; inside the commitment | $0/mo Starter ($49 min) · $100/mo Growth · $500/mo Professional |
Per-message (SMS) | Not published; typically bundled | ~$0.009 Starter to ~$0.007 Professional |
Per-message (MMS) | Not published | ~$0.024 to ~$0.045 by plan |
Carrier pass-through | Applies; disclosure varies by contract | ~$0.004/SMS, ~$0.008/MMS, billed at cost |
Contract | Commonly an annual commitment, invoiced monthly | Free trial, month-to-month path available |
How you get a number | Sales conversation and a proposal | Read it off the pricing page |
Three inputs move
an Attentive quote
more than the rest.
Knowing what the pricing model is sensitive to is most of your negotiating position, because it tells you which concessions are cheap for them to give.
Your subscriber count. List size sets the base of the commitment. It is also the number most brands quote optimistically, counting every phone number ever collected rather than the engaged, deliverable list. Clean this before you get quoted, not after.
Your annual send volume. How many messages you will actually send, which is a function of list size, campaign cadence, and how heavily your automations fire. A brand that sends twice a week and one that sends daily have very different bills on the same list.
Your contract length. The longest lever. A brand that will commit to multiple years gets a materially different number than one that wants twelve months, and a brand that will not commit at all is usually not the customer this model is built for.
The quote is not a price. It is a proposal about how much your program is worth to them.
Why searching "Attentive
Mobile pricing" returns
no number either.
Attentive Mobile is the company's legal and original name, and plenty of buyers search it that way because it is what appears on a contract or an invoice. It is the same company and the same product, so the answer is the same: no published pricing, quote only.
Worth knowing when you get to paperwork, though. The entity you sign with and the brand on the website are not always spelled the same way, and if you are reconciling an invoice line against a signed agreement, that is the mismatch you are looking at rather than a billing error.
Price your volume
against a rate you
can actually read.
Because Attentive quotes and will not benchmark itself, you have to build the benchmark. The most useful thing you can do before a sales call is model your own volume against a platform that publishes every layer, so you walk in with a floor.
Take your engaged subscriber count, your realistic annual send volume including automations, and price it at a published rate. The figures in Figure 1 give you that: a platform fee you can look up, a per-message rate by plan, and carrier fees billed at cost. The output is not what Attentive should charge. It is the number below which a managed quote stops being worth the management.
Then decide what the managed layer is worth to you, explicitly and in dollars. Attentive's model includes strategy support and a team that runs alongside yours, and for a brand without an in-house lifecycle owner that has real value. Paying for management is not the mistake. Paying for it without ever pricing the alternative is, and an opaque quote is built to let you skip that step.
What to get in
writing before you
sign anything.
Five things. Get them in the agreement, not in an email from a rep who may not be there at renewal.
The all-in annual figure, including carrier fees. Ask directly whether carrier pass-through sits inside the commitment or arrives on top of it. This is the single most common surprise on a first invoice.
What happens when you exceed the volume. Overage terms, and the rate they apply. A commitment sized to a good year is a problem in a great one.
What happens when you undershoot. Whether unused volume rolls over or is simply gone. Usually gone, which is why the commitment should be sized to a conservative forecast rather than a target.
The renewal uplift. The percentage increase at renewal, capped and in writing. An uncapped renewal is where a good first-year number quietly becomes a bad third-year one.
Who owns the list and the data on exit. Export rights, format, and how long you have to retrieve them. This matters more than anything else in the contract, because it decides whether the second negotiation is a real one.
If you want the comparison rather than the pricing mechanics, the side-by-side against a published platform is in Attentive vs Postscript. If you are weighing how much of the budget belongs in texting in the first place, start with email versus SMS for DTC.
Questions brands ask
about Attentive
pricing.
Q: How much does Attentive cost?
There is no published answer, and that is the honest response rather than an evasion. Attentive does not operate a public rate card or a self-serve tier, so every price is a negotiated quote sized to your subscriber count, your annual send volume, and your contract length. The structure is typically an annual platform commitment invoiced monthly, with message and carrier costs folded into that negotiated number. Any specific figure you find quoted online is one brand's contract on terms you cannot see, so use it as anecdote rather than as a benchmark.
Q: Does Attentive publish pricing?
No. As of September 2026 there is no pricing page, no rate card, and no way to start sending without a sales conversation. This is deliberate: managed-service vendors price on what a program is worth to the customer rather than on units consumed, and a published rate removes that flexibility. It also means the burden of building a comparison falls on you, which is why pricing your own volume against a platform that does publish is the most useful preparation for the call.
Q: What is Attentive SMS pricing per message?
Attentive does not publish a per-message rate. In most agreements the message cost is bundled into the negotiated commitment rather than billed as a visible per-send line, which is precisely what makes it hard to compare against a platform that quotes cents per text. To get a usable comparison, ask for the effective cost per message implied by your commitment at your forecast volume, and ask whether carrier pass-through is inside that figure or added on top.
Q: Is Attentive Mobile pricing different from Attentive pricing?
No, it is the same company and the same product. Attentive Mobile is the legal and original company name, which is why it appears on contracts and invoices while the website and marketing use Attentive. Neither name has published pricing. The distinction only matters at the paperwork stage, when the entity on the agreement does not match the brand name you have been talking to.
Q: Is Attentive worth it compared with a self-serve platform?
It depends on whether you have someone in-house who owns lifecycle marketing. Attentive's model includes strategy support and a team running alongside yours, and for a brand without that capability the management is doing real work. For a brand that already has a lifecycle owner, you are paying a premium for a service you are staffed to perform, and a platform with published pricing keeps the economics and the list in your hands. Price both against the same volume before deciding, because the quote will not do that comparison for you.