10DLC throughput, tier by tier
10DLC throughput is the quiet bottleneck. Your messages are approved, nothing is rejected, and yet the send takes four hours. This is why — and what actually moves the number.
What throughput actually measures
Throughput is message segments per second, not messages. That distinction costs people real money. A 160-character GSM message is one segment. Go one character over, or include a single emoji, and it splits — a 320-character message consumes two or three segments of your rate.
So a campaign rated at 240 segments per second does not send 240 messages per second if your copy is long. Tightening message length is the fastest throughput gain available to you, and it costs nothing.
Tiers are set by trust score, not by your platform
After brand vetting, TCR assigns a trust score. That score maps to a carrier tier, and the tier sets both your per-second rate and your daily cap. No platform can raise this for you, because no platform assigns it.
| Tier | Typical trust score | Rate | Daily cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1unvetted / low | Low | ~4–15 seg/sec | ~4,500 |
| T2standard vetted | Medium | ~60 seg/sec | ~40,000 |
| T3high trust | High | ~240 seg/sec | ~200,000 |
| Sole propindividual | N/A | ~1 seg/sec | ~1,000 |
Diagnosing a throttle
A throttle rarely announces itself. The symptoms look like a slow platform:
- Sends that queue and drain over hours instead of minutes
- Delivery receipts arriving long after the send completed
- Time-sensitive messages — OTPs, reminders — landing late
- Volume spikes that never actually spike
If your platform shows queue depth, look there first. A queue that grows during a send and drains slowly afterwards is a rate limit, not a bug.
How to actually raise it
Three routes, in order of effort:
- Shorten your messages. Free, immediate, and often worth 30–50% more messages per second. Drop the emoji, drop the long URL, use a link shortener.
- Fix your brand filing. A low trust score frequently traces to a mismatch between the filed name and the IRS record, or a thin public business footprint. Correcting the filing can re-score you.
- Buy secondary vetting. A one-off fee, roughly $40, for a deeper review. Worth it when your score is low despite an accurate filing — and pointless if the filing itself is wrong.
Order matters: paying for secondary vetting before fixing an inaccurate brand filing usually just buys you a second confirmation of the same problem.