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Text messages and consent

Text your clients reminders and prompts they actually read, with the consent record and opt-out handling the law requires.

Professional Clients and properties

Texts get read. A texted appointment reminder prevents the no-show an email does not, and a texted review prompt reaches somebody who has not opened an email in months.

Texting is also the channel with legal teeth, so consent is not a setting bolted on the side of this feature — consent is the feature, and delivery is the easy part.

Understand what the law requires

Under the US TCPA, a promotional message sent without prior express written consent carries statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per message — and that lands on the business that sent it, not only on the platform. Carriers separately require that STOP and HELP always work.

That is why this product will not let you text somebody who has not agreed, and why it asks for the two kinds of agreement separately.

A client answers two questions, not one:

  • Service texts — messages about work they have actually booked. A reminder about tomorrow’s visit.
  • Marketing texts — anything promotional.

They are separate because agreeing to a reminder is not agreeing to be sold to, and treating one as the other is precisely what the rules are about.

Consent is recorded on the client, where you can see it, and every decision to text anybody goes through the same check. No part of the product decides consent for itself.

Honor STOP and HELP

A client who replies STOP is opted out, immediately and everywhere. HELP answers with who is texting them and how to reach you.

Neither of those is something you have to configure or remember. They are handled for you because a carrier will suspend a number that does not honor them.

What gets texted

Texts are sent as a consequence of something that happened — an appointment approaching, a job finishing — rather than in the middle of a request. That is a deliberate design decision with a practical effect: an outage at the message provider can never fail a booking. The booking succeeds and the text is sent when it can be.

What it costs

Texting needs Professional, because unlike an email a text costs us per message.

Every equivalent notification is available by email on every plan. Choosing Starter does not mean your clients go unreminded; it means the reminder arrives by email.

This page describes SMS Notifications & Consent. It is written from that feature’s record and covers what has shipped, never what is planned.