SMS Profit-Per-Message Calculator
Your SMS dashboard shows revenue and calls every blast a win. It hides two real costs: the carrier fee on every message, and the lifetime value of every subscriber who opts out. Enter your numbers and this calculator shows the true profit per send — and whether an aggressive text program is quietly losing money by burning the list.
The true profit of an SMS send is gross revenue minus two costs the platform rarely nets out: the per-message carrier fee on the whole list, and the lifetime value of the subscribers who opt out because of the send. Opt-outs matter because an SMS list is finite, permission-based, and expensive to rebuild — each one is a permanent loss of future revenue. This calculator subtracts both from revenue to show net profit per message, so you can see whether more sending is building value or burning it.
SMS Profit-Per-Message Calculator inputs and result
How to use this calculator
- Enter the audience and message costSubscribers messaged and your all-in cost per send. Pick a message type to load a typical rate, then edit it.
- Add conversion rate and order valueHow many recipients buy and the average revenue per order.
- Add the opt-out rate and subscriber LTVThis is the part dashboards skip. The opt-out rate times subscriber lifetime value is the future revenue each send destroys.
- Read true net profit per messageThe headline nets carrier fees and lost subscriber value out of revenue, so you see real profit, not vanity revenue.
- Protect the list, then exportIf a send loses money or burns heavily, cut frequency and tighten targeting. Copy a share link or export the CSV.
RGM Expert Says
SMS is the most powerful and the most abused channel we work in. It reaches almost everyone within minutes, which tempts brands into treating it like free email — but it is neither free nor forgiving. Every message carries a real carrier cost, and every opt-out is a permanent loss of a subscriber who was expensive to earn and cannot be re-permissioned. The platform reports the revenue and hides both costs, so programs that look like winners are often eroding value.
We insist on pricing the opt-out. When a brand sees that a blast earned forty thousand dollars but cost it ten thousand in lost lifetime value, the strategy changes overnight from maximizing sends to maximizing profit per opt-out. That single reframe usually means fewer, sharper, more time-sensitive texts to the most responsive subscribers — which is also exactly what keeps an SMS list healthy enough to be worth having.
The brands that win on SMS treat the list as a scarce, appreciating asset rather than a faucet. They reserve it for moments that genuinely deserve an interruption, they segment hard, and they accept a lower send volume in exchange for a list that stays large and responsive. Restraint is not caution here; it is the strategy, because the channel pays the most to whoever burns it the least.
How it works
Gross revenue is the audience times conversion rate times order value. From that the tool subtracts two real costs: message cost, which is the audience times the per-message fee, and list-burn, which is the number of opt-outs times subscriber lifetime value. What remains is net profit, divided by the audience to give profit per message and shown as a share of gross consumed by burn.
- Cost/msg — all-in carrier and platform cost per message.
- Opt-out rate — share who unsubscribe per send; higher than email.
- Subscriber LTV — future value of one subscriber; the price of an opt-out.
- List-burn — lifetime value destroyed by this send’s opt-outs.
This values an opt-out at full subscriber LTV, which is the right call when the list is hard to regrow; if you can re-permission cheaply, discount it. Confirm conversion and opt-out rates from your own send history. See RGM’s SMS field guide.
Why the opt-out is the number that matters
Email made marketers careless about unsubscribes because the list regrows cheaply and the send is free. SMS breaks both assumptions. A text costs real money every time, and an SMS opt-out is close to permanent, since re-permissioning a mobile number is far harder than recapturing an email. That changes the whole economics: on SMS the scarce resource is not attention, it is the right to keep messaging at all.
Pricing the opt-out is what turns SMS from a volume game into a profit game. The moment you multiply opt-outs by subscriber lifetime value, the cost of an aggressive blast becomes visible, and it is often larger than the revenue the blast produced. Programs that ignore this metric tend to grow loud and then go quiet, having texted their best subscribers into unsubscribing; programs that watch it stay small, responsive, and durably profitable.
The strategic conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone with a send quota: on SMS, restraint outperforms volume. The highest-value programs reserve the channel for genuinely time-sensitive, high-margin moments, segment to the people most likely to act, and measure success as profit per opt-out rather than revenue per send. Treat permission as the asset it is, and the channel compounds; treat it as free, and it burns.
SMS economics benchmarks
Reference ranges to sanity-check inputs. Your real figures depend on country, provider, and list quality.
| Metric | Typical range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per SMS (US) | ~$0.02 to $0.03 | MMS roughly double |
| Conversion per send | ~1% to 3% | Higher for triggered, lower for broadcast |
| Opt-out per send | ~0.3% to 1%+ | Rises sharply with over-sending |
| Opt-out vs email unsub | Far more permanent | Re-permissioning a number is hard |