Subscription + Usage Fees

At Alive5, our goal is to offer a best-in-class communication platform filled with features, stellar support, and great value achieved through smart and flexible pricing.

Affordable subscriptions and usage-based text credits allow you to easily adjust costs to match the seasonality of your business’ demand for texting.

Users

A subscription plan (Alive5 SMS STARTER, PRO, PRO PLUS, PREMIUM, ENTERPRISE) includes up to a certain number of users or lines.

For example, the PRO plan includes up to 3 users and 3 lines. A user consists of a unique login (email and password) in which a team member can chat with unlimited contacts (mobile cell numbers) which is limited by text credits consumed (explained below).

Additionally, users are limited by concurrent logins. For example, if your plan includes 3 users (using the PRO plan example above), you can create unlimited users (email and passwords) in your account, but limited to 3 users logged in at the same time.

Lines

A line refers to an office phone line you can enable for SMS texting. We do not interfere with the voice functionality, only the SMS messaging portion of a phone line. So you can keep your existing voice phone service (Comcast Business, Vonage, Ring Central, etc), and use Alive5 in parallel. Alive5 does not offer voice.

Think about users and lines like "musical chairs" - you have 3 chairs for users and 3 chairs for lines for your entire team to use.

If you need more users and lines you can easily purchase add-ons or upgrade your plan.

Text Credits

For usage, your Alive5 account is equipped with text credits that are allocated every billing cycle. These credits can be used for sending and receiving SMS messages. Each plan includes a set amount of monthly text credits (150 for STARTER, 500 for PRO, 1,500 for PRO PLUS, 3,000 for PREMIUM, and 10,000 for ENTERPRISE).

• One text credit consists of up to 160 characters, or 70 characters if the message includes an emoji. Messages longer than 160 characters will require multiple text credits.
• Using Emojis 😃: Using an emoji decreases the number of characters that can fit in a credit from 160 to 70. Each emoji takes up 2 characters.
• Using Unicode characters á: Using a unicode character, similar to emojis, decreases the number of characters that can fit in a credit from 160 to 70. In contrast to emojis, a unicode takes up 1 character.
• MMS: Images 🖼 and multimedia files: When sending smaller files (less than 500KB) from Alive5 to a mobile cell phone, it costs 4 credits, while larger files (greater than 500KB) will be converted to a link and cost 1 credit. When mobile cell phone users send an inbound text with an image or video, it will cost 4 credits.

Example messages and costs:

An Easy Way to Estimate Credits

Before sending, easily estimate credit usage by looking towards the right in the input box:

Broadcasts and Text Credits

When sending SMS Broadcasts, it's especially important to be mindful of how many credits your message takes up. In the above example, if you were to send the first message (without the emoji) to 5000 contacts, it would cost you 5000 credits. If you had added an emoji, it would then have cost 15000 credits (3x more!).

Rollover and Overages

At the end of each billing cycle (monthly or annually), Alive5 will conduct a calculation to determine the total number of text credits utilized over that period and deduct it from your balance. Any unused credits will be retained indefinitely in your account as a pool for all users ("Rollover") until it's used up or you cancel your account. Any usage exceeding your balance ("Overage") will be charged at the text credit rate multiplied by the number of excess text credits.

Viewing Your SMS Usage

To view your account's text message usage, log into your Alive5 Desktop Console, and click on your name at the top right, then ACCOUNT & USAGE.