Why you can text your own list without lying awake
Most contractors never work their old customer list, and the reason is almost always the same: nobody wants a TCPA letter. Exposure runs $500 to $1,500 per message, so the instinct to leave the money sitting there is rational. This page is the machinery that makes working it a considered risk instead of a gamble — and every piece of it is enforced in code, not in a policy document.
The honest split
No vendor can take on your legal obligations, and you should be suspicious of one that says it can. What a platform can do is make the wrong thing hard to do by accident, and keep the evidence that you did the right thing. So:
Yours
The relationship with the people on your list. You tell us where the list came from and confirm you have the standing to contact them — that is a statement only you can make.
Ours
Enforcing it. Refusing list types we won’t send to, checking every message before it leaves, honoring opt-outs permanently, and keeping a record you can export if anyone ever asks.
1. Which lists can send at all
Consent is not transferable, and it is not portable across channels — buying a list does not buy consent, and an email opt-in is not permission to text. So the question of where a list came from is asked at upload and enforced at send.
We send to people you have an actual prior relationship with: past and current customers, people who requested a quote or inquired, an export of those from your CRM, and your own text subscribers. A purchased or third-party list is refused outright.
Two details that matter more than the list itself. First, the rule lives in one place in our codebase and is applied identically at upload, in the setup wizard, and at both points a campaign can be triggered — so it cannot quietly disagree with itself in one corner of the product. Second, an unanswered question fails closed: if we don’t know where a list came from, it doesn’t send. The default is silence, not benefit of the doubt.
2. The record, kept for you
When you sign up you confirm a few things in writing — that you have consent for the contacts you’ll reach, that you’re not marketing in a category carriers prohibit, and that you won’t put health information into the system.
Those confirmations are written to an append-only record with the date, and with the exact wording you agreed to — not a reference to it. If we later reword the checkbox, your record still shows what was actually on your screen. That record survives even the deletion of your account, because the moment it matters is the moment someone asks about a message sent years ago.
Alongside it, every message we send is logged with its consent basis, and the log is exportable. Contemporaneous evidence is the difference between answering a complaint and arguing with one.
3. What every single message passes
Not the campaign — every message, in this order:
- Suppression list
- Anyone who has opted out of this business is blocked. This is a hard block — the message is never retried, and the send primitive itself refuses rather than trusting the caller to have checked first.
- Lead opt-out status
- A second, per-lead check on the contact record. Also a hard block, also never retried.
- Quiet hours
- Evaluated in the recipient’s local time, derived from their number — not your timezone, and not the server’s. This is a soft block: the message waits and sends when the window opens, rather than being dropped.
- Frequency caps
- Per phone number, per business, so a contact can’t be hit repeatedly by separate campaigns. Soft block — it retries past the window.
The distinction between a hard and a soft block is deliberate. A suppressed contact must never be messaged, so that failure is permanent. A message arriving at the wrong hour is a timing problem, so it waits — dropping it would quietly cost you the follow-up you’re paying for.
4. Opt-outs, honored permanently
People do not opt out in the format a regulation imagines. They write “STOP.”, “STOP NOW”, “please stop”, “stop texting me”. All of those suppress the contact instantly. We deliberately do not treat “cancel” as an opt-out — in this trade that word means an appointment, and misreading it would silence a customer who was trying to reschedule.
The bias is intentional: over-suppressing is recoverable, because the person can text START. Under-suppressing is a violation.
Opt-outs are also kept against your business, not just your account. If you cancel and come back later, the people who said stop are still suppressed. If you import a new list, anyone who previously opted out is screened out of it before a single message is queued. A STOP is forever, and the record outlives the subscription.
5. Who your texting is registered to
US business texting has to be registered with the carriers. Plenty of vendors skip this, or put every client under one brand without mentioning it. Here is ours, plainly.
Today your number sends under our registered brand and campaign. That is why you can be texting the same week rather than waiting on carrier vetting, and why we don’t need your EIN to get you started. The tradeoff is that it is a shared registration — which is precisely why the rules above are as strict as they are. On a shared registration, one business sending badly is everyone’s problem, so we don’t allow the kind of list that causes it.
As we grow, customers move onto their own brand registration. We will tell you before that happens, not after.
What this page is not
It isn’t legal advice, and it isn’t a promise that nothing can go wrong. These controls reduce risk; they don’t remove it, and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling you something. What we’ll do instead is show you the mechanism behind any line on this page — ask, and we’ll walk you through the actual screen.
The five questions worth asking any vendor in this category, including us, are in the buyer guide. The end-recipient opt-in terms are on the SMS program page.