If you run a café in the United States and you text customers — order-ready alerts, a weekly special, a win-back offer — there is a piece of plumbing you cannot ignore: A2P 10DLC registration. Since the major US carriers rolled it out, unregistered business texting from ordinary phone numbers gets filtered, throttled, or blocked outright. The good news is that registration is straightforward and cheap once you understand the three moving parts. The bad news is that “I’ll just text people from my Google Voice number” quietly stopped working.
This guide explains what A2P 10DLC is, why it exists, what it actually costs a small café, and how to get registered — plus the one option that sidesteps the whole system. It is written for an independent coffee shop or restaurant owner, not a telecom engineer.
What A2P 10DLC actually means
Break the acronym apart and it explains itself:
- A2P — Application-to-Person. Texts sent by software (your marketing platform, your ordering system) to a person, as opposed to you thumb-typing a message to a friend (that’s P2P).
- 10DLC — 10-Digit Long Code. A standard 10-digit local phone number, as opposed to a short code (those 5-6 digit numbers big brands use) or a toll-free number.
Put together: A2P 10DLC is the framework US carriers use to sanction businesses sending automated texts from normal phone numbers. Before it existed, spammers abused local numbers and carriers responded with aggressive filtering that also caught legitimate small businesses. Registration is the carriers’ fix — prove who you are and what you’ll send, and your messages get trusted delivery.
Unregistered business texting in the US is no longer “risky.” It is largely non-functional — carriers filter it.
The two things you register: a brand and a campaign
Registration happens through The Campaign Registry (TCR), the central body the carriers use. There are two layers, and your texting platform files both for you:
- The brand — your business identity. Legal business name, address, and either an EIN (for a registered company) or your details as a sole proprietor. This is a one-time identity check.
- The campaign — your use case: what you will actually text about. For a café this is typically a “marketing” or “low-volume mixed” use case with a description like “order confirmations and promotional offers to customers who opted in.” You also declare sample messages and how people opt in and out.
The reason for two layers: the brand says who you are, the campaign says what you’ll send and to whom. Carriers approve the combination.
What it costs a small café
Fees are set by TCR and the carriers, are passed through by your platform, and — importantly — have changed more than once (several went up in August 2025, and carrier surcharges have been adjusted since). So treat the figures below as representative ranges and confirm current numbers with your provider before you budget.
| Item | Typical cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Brand registration | ~$4 one-time (sole proprietor) to ~$44+ (standard brand with vetting) | One-time identity registration |
| Campaign registration | ~$15 one-time to vet the use case | Per campaign |
| Monthly campaign fee | ~$1.50–$10 per campaign / month | Varies by use case type |
| Carrier per-message surcharge | ~$0.002–$0.005 per SMS segment | On top of your platform’s own per-message rate |
Ranges reflect widely reported 2025-2026 figures across texting platforms; TCR and carrier fees change periodically. Confirm current pricing with your provider.
For a café, the real-world math is modest: a low one-time setup outlay, a few dollars a month, and a fraction of a cent per text on top of whatever your SMS platform charges. It is a rounding error against the revenue a good win-back text drives — but it is not optional, and the per-message surcharges mean SMS is never truly “free” the way an app push is.
How to register, step by step
You will not touch the carriers directly. The flow, through whatever SMS tool you use (Square Marketing’s texting, or a dedicated platform), is:
- Confirm your business details. Have your legal business name, address, and EIN handy — or register as a sole proprietor if you have no EIN. Mismatched details are the top cause of rejection, so match your name exactly to your tax/registration records.
- Register your brand. Submit the identity info through your platform. Standard brands may go through a vetting step; sole-proprietor brands are lighter but have lower daily send limits.
- Create your campaign. Choose the use case (marketing / mixed), write a clear description, provide 2-3 sample messages, and — critically — spell out your opt-in and opt-out language (“Reply STOP to unsubscribe”).
- Wait for approval. This can take anywhere from a few business days to a couple of weeks depending on vetting. Register before a big promo, not the week of.
- Keep your consent records. Only text people who explicitly opted in, honor STOP immediately, and keep proof of consent. Registration gets your messages delivered; consent keeps you legal.
Consent still matters — 10DLC is not a license to spam
Registration handles deliverability. It does not replace consent law. In the US you still need proper opt-in and must honor opt-outs; the same discipline that keeps you onside with Canada’s CASL rules for texting customers applies in spirit here. Buy a list, blast strangers, and you will get complaints, carrier penalties, and brand damage — registered or not. The winning approach is the boring one: collect phone numbers with a clear opt-in at the counter or at checkout, and text people who actually want to hear from you.
The shortcut: push notifications skip the whole system
Here is the part most café owners do not realize. A2P 10DLC, carrier surcharges, and per-message fees all apply to SMS — not to push notifications. A push notification sent through your own branded app is not a text message; it never touches the carrier network, so there is no registration, no vetting delay, and no per-message charge. Once a customer installs your app and opts in, you can message them for free, forever.
That is why the smart channel mix for a café is usually both: SMS for the widest reach to anyone who gave you a number, and push for your app regulars. If you have not thought through which message belongs on which channel, our breakdown of email vs SMS vs push for cafés lays out the trade-offs, and the case for push notifications as a retention engine is strong precisely because it dodges the costs and compliance overhead you just read about.
The takeaway
If your café texts customers from a US phone number, A2P 10DLC registration is mandatory, cheap, and handled mostly by your texting platform — register your brand and campaign through The Campaign Registry, keep clean consent records, and confirm the current fees since they move. And remember the escape hatch: push notifications through a branded app carry none of this cost or paperwork.
For cafés on Square, a branded order-ahead app with push, self-running loyalty, and web ordering — live in about a day for $99 CAD/month per location — gives you a compliance-free channel to your regulars alongside whatever SMS you run. See how it works. Use SMS for reach, push for your regulars, and keep every message something a customer actually opted in to receive.