Brad Bogus

What You’re Really Paying for with Dispensary SMS Marketing Software

Stop getting fleeced on SMS campaigns in retail cannabis--We're pulling back the curtain on cannabis SMS software to show dispensary marketers what they really pay for.

"What's the difference between me and you?
You talk a good one, but you don't do what you supposed to do."


— Dr. Dre feat. MC Phish, What’s The Difference

Most retailers in the cannabis industry are just looking for a text marketing tool that does what it is supposed to do. After years of failed promises and big headlines, there’s a ton of skepticism about what differentiates one SMS/MMS marketing platform from another.

One way to immediately distinguish us apart: pricing.

Transparency in Cannabis SMS Marketing

Pricing models offered by our competitors are often convoluted, not transparent, and/or constructed in a way to put the cost of failure on the retailer.

In other words, they don’t want you calculating the cost per message delivered. They want you paying to send them. If they fail to deliver what their platform promises, retailers are stuck with the bill.

Happy Cabbage only charges our clients for messages that get delivered. 

This is a stake in the ground, a position we take as a company. It says “we believe in what we say we can do, and we’ll pay to prove it.” It’s a promise to work with our clients to improve their outcomes at all costs.

And if we fail, we pay. Not you.

How Delivery Rates Influence Cannabis SMS Marketing Costs and ROI

If you pay for a text marketing plan from a service  with a low monthly fee, but with pricing based on messages SENT (not delivered), your costs will always be higher than working with Happy Cabbage.

Why? When delivery rates on their platforms are far below 50% (and they are according to every client we’ve worked with that have been on their platforms) you’re still paying to send 100% of those messages.

Around 80% of our clients enjoy delivery rates above 50% on average, with over half our clients benefiting from delivery rates between 75% and 100%. These clients that follow our best practices consistently enjoy a 90+% delivery rate and impactful ROI.

The volume of messages most cannabis retailers send is so high, that other services can offer unsustainably low monthly platform fees because they’re going to make it up off of you in charging for every message regardless of delivery.

They don’t have confidence in their ability to help you. Otherwise, they’d put their money where their mouth is.

And right now, their mouth is telling you to move away from text marketing, that delivery rates will never be high, that they can’t send to certain carriers, that robocalls are going to do better.

We’re telling you that text marketing still works great. Our clients continue to make enormous ROI on this channel, higher than almost every other marketing channel.

We don’t need to distract you with apps, bells and whistles, or more voicemails. We know our platform and our team will lead you to success.

So, we put our money where our mouth is.

Generic Cannabis SMS Pricing Example

In this table, price per message and delivery rate are set the same. We know for a fact that other services charge a higher price per message than listed, and that their delivery rates are way lower. 

HCA Generic Provider
Monthly Platform Fee $900 $300
Price Per Messages $0.014 $0.014
Messages Sent 150,000 150,000
Messages Delivered 105,000 105,000
Cost for Messages $1,470 $2,100
Total Cost $2,370 $2,400

The reality is that the cost of working with other services is much higher than we are showing here. We set these things as the same so you can see in the math that there’s almost no scenario where our service costs as much as our competitors do. 

This math doesn’t factor in the cost of burning your contacts list, or the cost of carriers blocking you from contacting due to poor deliverability. 

While Happy Cabbage never charges you for undelivered texts, we continually monitor cannabis text deliverability across all numbers for all our customers, automatically disposing of under-performing numbers and allocating new ones. This further improves the deliverability and ROI our customers experience when executing SMS and MMS text marketing campaigns for their dispensaries and cannabis brands.

Realistic Cannabis SMS Pricing Example

Here’s a pricing comparison that is more accurate-to-reality, where we use the same price per messages our clients were being charged on our competitors’ platforms, as well as the lower deliverability rates they reported to us.


HCA Generic Provider
Monthly Platform Fee $900 $300
Price Per Messages $0.014 $0.06
Messages Sent 150,000 150,000
Messages Delivered 105,000 60,000
Cost for Messages $1,470 $9,000
Total Cost $2,370 $9,300

We invest in you, and in us, to win together. They simply don’t. And it costs you in the end. 

Don’t be distracted by ultra-low monthly fees. Know that there’s a catch. Reach out to us to get the straight talk.