The short version
No, not to start. US carriers let a sole proprietor register a texting number without an EIN. But you get one number, one campaign, and a hard cap of 3,000 message segments a day, with only 1,000 of those to T-Mobile.
This question stops more bands from starting a text list than any other, usually because somebody heard a horror story about carrier registration and filed it under problems for later.
What 10DLC is, briefly
If a business sends texts to US phones from a normal ten-digit number, carriers require that number to be registered. That is A2P 10DLC: application-to-person messaging on a ten-digit long code. Unregistered traffic gets filtered or blocked, which is why texts from an unregistered number quietly stop arriving.
The sole proprietor route
You do not need a company. Sole proprietor registration exists specifically for people in the US and Canada without a business tax ID. Verification is minimal and campaign registration costs about a dollar fifty. This is where almost every band should start.
The limits are real and worth knowing before you build on them:
- One phone number per sole proprietor brand. Not one per member, one total.
- One campaign at a time on the starter tier.
- One message per second sending rate.
- 3,000 SMS segments per day across all carriers.
- Of those, a sub-limit of 1,000 per day to T-Mobile numbers.
When you outgrow it
The T-Mobile sub-limit usually bites first. A thousand T-Mobile messages a day sounds like plenty right up until you have two thousand names and a tour announcement, at which point your send spreads over days and stops being an announcement.
In practice, somewhere around a thousand fans is where a band feels the ceiling. That is the point to register as a business with an EIN, which raises throughput and allows more than one campaign.
The straight answer
Start as a sole proprietor. It costs almost nothing, it works, and the caps sit far above where a band with two hundred names will ever land. Set up the LLC when the limit is actually costing you a room, not before. Doing it in the wrong order is spending money to feel professional.
If you work with us we handle registration either way and tell you when it is time to move. It is not the interesting part of the job. It is the part that decides whether your texts arrive.
Sources
Want this running for your band?
We build the site, wire the fan capture, and keep it running. And we come to the shows, which is the part a platform cannot do.
Start the conversation