It’s October, so let’s talk about the things that really keep political consultants up at night. Not ghosts. Not zombies. Not even the 9:15 p.m. “tiny change” from a client.
We’re talking about the quiet horrors of managing a texting vendor: the hours that vanish into support threads, registration updates, and invoices that don’t match what you were quoted. None of it shows up on a bill, and all of it costs real time. We call it the Vendor Babysitting Tax, and it has a way of haunting your calendar all year.
So for Halloween, we’re asking the industry to finally count those hours. No vendor names needed; we’re counting hours, not starting a witch hunt.
Why We’re Asking
This fall, we started keeping a public scoreboard of what “full service” texting vendors actually cost their clients, in staff hours rather than invoice dollars. We call it the Vendor Babysitting Tax Index. Firms use a short calculator, get a receipt showing the time their team spends managing a vendor, and add it to a running tally.
The early numbers surprised even us. And they echo what we hear from firms directly: one fundraising firm we spoke with was paying a penny per text, a rate that looked fantastic on paper, and still had four people spending more than 1,000 hours a year managing the relationship. The rate looked great. The receipt didn’t.
Every hour on a receipt like that has a story behind it: the email thread, the registration saga, the invoice that took a week to untangle. Those stories are what people remember, and the Index is how we turn them into something the whole industry can see.
Welcome to the Haunted House of Texting Vendor Management
You may recognize a few rooms. (These are illustrative scenarios, not specific accounts, but you’ve probably lived a version of them.)
🕯️ The Ticket That Never Dies
You submit it Monday and get an auto-reply. By Thursday, someone asks you to “provide more details” about the thing you already described. The campaign launches Friday. You’re now reading the same email thread for the fourth time, and the ticket is still open. It will probably outlive the campaign.
🧟 The Registration That Rose From the Grave
You were told it was approved. Then it wasn’t. Then it was “pending.” Then came a new form, a new carrier requirement, and a new deadline you found out about from a rejected send. Compliance admin has a way of coming back just when you thought you’d buried it.
👻 The Invoice From Beyond
It didn’t match the quote, so you asked about it. The explanation involved a fee you’d never heard of, so you spent two hours on a reconciliation that should have been a one-line email. Next month, it comes back to haunt you again.
🕸️ The Spreadsheet Cobweb
Somewhere on a team drive is a file named “FINAL_v7_USE THIS ONE,” and nobody remembers why. It’s the list you cleaned, then re-cleaned, then cleaned again for a platform that wasn’t set up to handle it. It’s still there. Watching. Waiting.
🧛 The Support Rep Who Drains Your Will to Live
They’re friendly. They’re polite. They have no idea what your account is, who you are, or what you told their colleague yesterday. Every conversation starts from zero. You explain the problem. They escalate it. Then the escalation goes to someone who asks you to explain the problem.
🎭 The Chatbot in a Trench Coat
It says it’s a person. It reads like a script. It suggests you “check the help center” for the article you’ve already read three times. By the time you reach someone with actual authority to fix anything, your send window is gone.
Why This Keeps Happening
It isn’t always carelessness; some of it comes from how the business is built. When the lowest per-text rate wins the deal, the cost comes out of somewhere, often support and onboarding. Many platforms are also self-serve by design, so when registration stalls or a list won’t load, the work lands on your team. And compliance keeps changing: in early Index findings, 10DLC and compliance admin is the single biggest hidden cost so far.
Mostly, though, nobody counts the hours. Vendors can promise fast support and simple billing because no one measures what it costs the client’s team. Until someone counts, the cost stays invisible.
Who Works for Whom?
Our Chief Growth Officer, Spencer Sullivan, put the question plainly in his open letter to political consultants in Campaigns & Elections: who works for whom? You hired a vendor to take work off your plate, but if you’re the one doing the vendor’s work, the arrangement has gone backwards.
We asked our LinkedIn network how many hours a week their team spends managing a texting vendor. It was a small poll, but 70% said four or more hours a week, and 40% said eight or more.
Add Your Receipt to the Index
Here’s the part that matters: we want your hours.
The Index is only useful if it reflects the real industry, and right now it’s a small sample. Every receipt makes it a better benchmark, so firms can finally see how their vendor workload compares with others of a similar size. It takes a couple of minutes:
- Run the calculator. Estimate the hours your team spends each week on campaign and list work, support, 10DLC and compliance, billing cleanup, and other vendor management. Rough is fine.
- Get your receipt. You’ll see your staff time, the workweeks lost, and the estimated payroll cost, on top of what you pay your vendor.
- Add it to the tally. Your numbers join the public Index.
👉 Run the calculator and add your receipt
Is my receipt public? Receipts on the Index are anonymous: just the program type, invoice size, hours, and estimated cost. The numbers are self-reported payroll-time estimates, not accounting calculations, but even rough numbers show how much work hides behind a low per-text price. And if your vendor was fine, add your receipt anyway. A low number helps show what the industry should look like.
The Not-Scary Version of Working with a Texting Vendor
It doesn’t have to be like this. If you’re evaluating a vendor, ask who actually sends your texts, who owns 10DLC and carrier compliance, what happens when you need help at night, and how many hours your team will spend on all of it. If they can’t answer that last one, that’s an answer.
At Texting for Less, our US-based team sends for you at no extra cost, during legal texting hours in your state. We handle 10DLC registration and carrier compliance, so registration stays our job. Real people are available during all legal texting hours, not a chatbot. Pricing is transparent, with no setup fees, no hidden fees, and no minimums on pay-as-you-go, and a live dashboard lets you watch your sends in real time. Our messaging strategies have been tested across 4,500+ campaigns, and we’ve been recognized with Pollie Awards for Best Use of SMS in 2025 and Best Use of MMS in 2026.
If your last few months felt like a haunted house, let’s talk. Send us one recent project or invoice, and we’ll show you how it would run with us. No 47-slide deck. Just an honest comparison of the work.
Because nobody should have to babysit their vendor, even on Halloween.
Who works for who? 🎃
