Two different things, and people mix them up constantly
There are two separate rulebooks in play when a business sends a text message, and they are easy to tangle together.
TCPA is the law. It is a federal statute about who you are allowed to contact and when. Getting it wrong is a legal problem.
A2P 10DLC is the carriers’ rulebook. It is not a law — it is what AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile require before they will carry business texts on a normal 10-digit number. Getting it wrong is a delivery problem, and a quiet one: your messages simply stop arriving and nobody tells you.
Where we actually are, today
This page describes how we built the product and what we take on for you. Two of those things run right now: consent scoping — no list import, and a text only about a call, quote, application or job on your account — and quiet hours, enforced before it is queued on every automated text to a customer or applicant bar a reply to a text the person has just sent (the answer to HELP, or a text-to-apply screening question).
The rest waits on one thing. Our SMS gateway and carrier account are not live yet, so no customer’s registration has been filed yet and nothing texts. Tailgate Office’s own texting program is filed with the carriers and waits for their approval. Messages your account produces are recorded and held in an outbox rather than sent, and inbound texting — which is what auto-answers STOP and HELP — switches on with the same build. Your quote widget does not touch any of this and works from day one. We would rather you read that here than find it out in week three.
What the TCPA actually says
Stripped of the lawyering, it comes down to one idea: do not send automated messages to people who did not ask to hear from you.
They contacted you first
In every one of those, the person handed you their number expecting to hear back about that specific thing. Replying is what they wanted. This is the only category our products operate in.
You went and found them
This is where contractors get in trouble, and it is essentially never the missed-call text-back. It is the moment somebody sells them a spreadsheet. Our platform will not send to an uploaded list.
Why we only text people who just contacted you
It is not caution for its own sake. It is a design decision that removes most of the risk before you ever log in.
The trigger is the inquiry itself
A CallMitt™ text exists only because a missed call was recorded against your account — today by you or your office logging it, later by the carrier feed. The trigger is always an inbound call, never a list. The consent and the trigger are the same event.
The message stays on topic
Existing-inquiry consent covers the thing they asked about. So the text is about that: sorry we missed you, reply here and we will get you scheduled. It is not a promotion, and the product will not let you turn it into one. The promotional texts the platform can send are a NapkinPrice™ follow-up asking whether a customer wants to book the estimate they got and a HurraBell™ review request after a job, and each needs its own written consent: a separate box on your quote form (for the review request, on your visit booking too) that starts unticked, that nobody has to tick to get a price, and that says exactly what they are agreeing to.
There is no texting-list import
People ask for it. We do not build it. You can bring your customer list into Customers for your own records, but an imported customer gets no thread and no texting path: that list is never a texting list. A bulk texting upload is the single feature most likely to end with a contractor getting a demand letter and a dead phone number, so it does not exist.
You are identified in the first line
Every automated message should name your business up front, and the template editor flags any message that does not. Anonymous business texting is both against carrier rules and the fastest way to get reported as spam by someone who forgot they called you.
No text sends at midnight
Automated texts to your customers and applicants are held to roughly 8am–9pm in the recipient's local time. The only ones that go at any hour are the two that answer a text the person sent moments before: the reply to HELP, and the next question to a candidate who has just texted your hiring keyword. The one other text that ignores the window is the new-lead alert you ask us to send to your own mobile. You cannot override the window into someone's dinner, and there is no setting that lets you.
One reply, not a campaign
The text-back is a single message opening a conversation, not a sequence. If they do not reply, no second text-back follows. A quote gets at most one follow-up, and only if you switch follow-ups on (they start off): one email, a text as well only for a customer who ticked the box, and it is cancelled if they text or call the number we answer for you, or you reply from your inbox first, or you press the stop link in the email telling you about the lead. Nagging people who ignored you is exactly the behavior the rules exist to stop.
A2P 10DLC: the part nobody explains
If your texts have ever “sent” and never arrived, this is almost certainly why.
A2P stands for application-to-person — a message sent by software rather than typed by a human. 10DLC means a standard ten-digit long code, which is to say a normal phone number like yours.
Since 2021, business texting from ordinary 10-digit US numbers has gone through registration with The Campaign Registry: who the business legally is, what kind of messages it sends, and examples of the actual message text. Registered traffic gets delivered at proper speed. Since 3 February 2025 unregistered traffic has been blocked altogether (Telnyx, 2026 (opens in a new tab)).
A block that says nothing is the dangerous part. Your dashboard says sent. The customer never sees it. Nobody bounces anything back. This is how a contractor can spend months believing his missed-call system is running while every message quietly evaporates.
Which is exactly why we hold messages instead of pretending. Until our carrier account is live there is nothing to register against, so no customer’s registration is filed and nothing sends — and your dashboard says held, not sent. Here is what the filing looks like when we submit yours.
We register the brand
Your legal business name, EIN, address and website go to the carrier registry as a verified brand. This is filed in your business name, not ours: it is your identity on the network.
We register the campaign
A "campaign" is a use case: missed-call reply, quote follow-up, hiring screening, review request. Each gets submitted with real sample messages and a written description of how consent is collected.
The carriers review it
They check that the business is real, the use case is legitimate, and the consent story holds up. This is the step where sloppy submissions get rejected and have to go around again.
Your texting number goes live
Once approved, you get your own texting number: a local number in your area code, registered to your business and linked to the approved campaign, and messages flow at full throughput. Your business line stays exactly where it is and keeps ringing as it does now.
How long it takes
The carriers’ review usually takes a few business days, with no guaranteed date: our texting provider tells us a clean sole-proprietor registration typically clears in two to three business days and a clean campaign in a few, and a submission the carriers question takes longer. We wish we could give you a firmer number, but the review sits with the carriers and it is not on a schedule we control — and we have not filed one for a customer yet, so this is what our provider tells us. Our own program’s filings were each questioned by the carriers more than once, so allow for that.
What our texting provider tells us
| Clean submission, EIN on file | usually a few business days |
|---|---|
| Sole proprietor (a code texted to your own mobile first) | typically two to three business days after the code is entered |
| Questioned by the carriers, or rejected and filed again | longer, with no guaranteed date |
Three commitments about how we run it. First, you pay the carrier’s registration fee at cost plus sales tax — their price, passed through, never marked up, and yours, never ours; nothing is filed until you have paid, and the fee is non-refundable once the carriers have charged it (a part they never charge is refunded). Second, once filing opens we file it for you during onboarding, from the setup guide, rather than waiting for your trial to end (until the carriers have approved our messaging wording once, we file the first registrations one at a time, so yours may wait in line for the one ahead of it), and the trial extends itself while it waits and while the carriers review it. Third, if it gets rejected we tell you exactly what they said and help you fix and re-file it, and where what they rejected is the messaging wording, which we write and you read and approve before it is filed, we correct our wording before anything goes back. Every re-file is yours at the carriers’ price, paid before it goes in, whoever wrote what they rejected: re-registering your business details is the carriers’ $4.50 ($4.50 for a sole proprietor), and a campaign re-file is $19.50, their review again and the new campaign’s first three months, both at cost (a sole proprietor’s registration holds one campaign, so its campaign re-file registers the details again too: $25.50). Those are the fees Telnyx, our texting provider, publishes (Telnyx price list (opens in a new tab), checked October 2026). The texts and calls on your own number are the carriers’ price too, never marked up. You never get handed a carrier rejection code and told good luck.
Meanwhile, nothing else is blocked. Your quote widget works from day one and needs no registration: it sends no text at all unless you switch on follow-up texts, a customer ticks the box for one, and your registration covers them. The texting features are the part that waits — they are built, they check the opt-out list, the suppression list and quiet hours before anything is queued, and they hold messages until delivery is live. Your 30-day trial extends itself: if your carrier registration is still pending near the end, or you have not had a real quote or call yet, it gets more time automatically and your dashboard says why. If that still leaves you short, say so and a person will extend it. We have never said no.
What we need from you
This is the entire list. It takes about five minutes to gather and you only do it once.
Sole proprietors
The carriers have a path for a business owned by one person, with no EIN, that is not an LLC, a corporation or a partnership: you register in your own name, and once the registration is filed they text a one-time code to your own mobile, which you enter in the setup guide to confirm it is you. The carriers allow a sole proprietor one texting number and one campaign, about 1,000 texts a day to T-Mobile customers and 15 a minute to AT&T's, and the same mobile on at most three such registrations. That is not close to binding for a contractor answering missed calls. An LLC, even with one owner, a corporation or a partnership cannot register this way, and nor can a business name or website with a word such as LLC, Inc, Company, Group, Home or Management in it; the carriers ask for an EIN then. It is on the legal-identity step of the setup guide: answer No to “Does your business have an EIN?”. The carriers price a sole proprietor’s registration differently (the brand $4.50, the campaign’s first three months $6.00, then $2.00 a month for the campaign), so the registration is $30.60 plus applicable sales tax, then $3.10 a month. A registration paid before we know whether Telnyx, our texting provider, charges $0.03 for assigning its number to its campaign also carries that $0.03, a one-time charge Telnyx lists in its technical documentation but not on its price list; it is refunded if it is not charged. Like every registration, nothing is filed until you have paid.
Opt-outs and quiet hours
The two operational rules you would otherwise have to police yourself. We run both for you, and you cannot switch them off.
STOP means stop, instantly
You cannot text an opted-out number from our platform. Not by accident, and not deliberately — the check runs before a message is ever queued, so a blocked message is recorded as blocked and never leaves.
No text sends in the middle of the night
That last point matters more than it sounds. Work near a state line and “8pm” is two different times depending on who you are texting. You should not have to think about that, and with us you do not.
Misuse it and we shut it off
We would rather say this plainly now than in an email later. If an account starts texting people who never contacted the business, we disable the texting features. Not a warning tier, not a fine — off.
This is not us being precious. Carrier campaigns are shared infrastructure and a single spam complaint pattern can get a campaign killed, which takes down delivery for the whole account. The damage does not stay in one place.
We will email you first if there is time. The disable is not negotiable, and the same rule applies to accounts that come through an agency partner.
Short of that, texting from your own number pauses by itself if opt-outs, carrier errors or carrier spam flags on it rise past set lines, and we pause it if a carrier asks: every text from that number stops, except the answer to someone who texts HELP and the carriers’ confirmation of a STOP, and a caller whose call is missed is offered no text and cannot leave a voice message, until a person here has looked at what happened and lifts it, and we email you when it is paused. Our terms set this out under Texting from your own number.
What gets an account switched off
The directory is not a list
This site also carries a contractor directory, read from businesses’ own websites. Being listed in it does not, by itself, put a business on any texting or email list of ours. The crawler that reads a website is a reader, not a sender: there is no path from a listing to anything that sends. Our sales research, which reads the same websites, is a separate record, described in the privacy policy.
No listing shows an email address found on a website. Tailgate Office may send a business a sales email, whether it is listed or not, but only to the address the business publishes on its own website or the email address a public license or registration list gives for the business itself, from a real sender, with our postal address and a one-click opt-out that we honor for good; from such a list we leave out the address of anyone licensed or registered on their own, and any address we can tell is a person’s own mailbox, such as a free mailbox spelled as a person’s name. We never send one to a business that asked to be removed from the directory or opted out, and a listing read from a business’s own website is free and never depends on buying anything. The one email the directory can send to a listed business’s domain is a claim confirmation, sent only to an address someone typed into the claim form, and only when that address is at the business’s own web domain. It carries no marketing, and no more than two go to one business in 30 days unless it confirms. A link in each one stops them for six months.
Changed on October 11, 2026: this card used to say that the directory never uses an email address found on a website. It now says when Tailgate Office may send a business a sales email, as our privacy policy does.
Changed on October 29, 2026: this card used to say that a sales email goes only to the address a business publishes on its own website. It now also allows the email address a public license or registration list gives for the business itself, leaving out the address of anyone licensed or registered on their own and any we can tell is a person’s own, as our privacy policy does.
What a claim email can and cannot be
Why this page exists at all
Because “compliance is handled” is a sentence a lot of vendors say and very few will put detail behind.
| Feature | With us | Doing it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Who files 10DLC registration | We do, per customer, from the setup guide, once filing opens and you have paid the carrier’s fee | You, through a carrier portal |
| Who fixes a rejection | We do, and we tell you why | You, from an error code |
| Registration cost | The carriers’ fees at cost, plus sales tax, and any re-file at their price too — we add nothing and charge no setup fee | The same carrier fees, plus your time |
| Texts and calls on your number | The carriers’ price for each, at cost — we add nothing | Whatever your texting provider charges |
| STOP handling | Permanent and unoverridable, included | However you built it |
| Quiet-hour enforcement | Send blocked and recorded, by recipient time zone — always on, running today; only a reply to a text the person has just sent (HELP, a screening question) goes outside it | Your own discipline |
| Bulk list uploads | Not possible | One button away from trouble |
| Consent records | Logged with timestamps | A spreadsheet, probably |
Questions we get every week
Replying to somebody who dialed your business number, about the thing they called about, is ordinary business communication and it is what our product does. It is not marketing to a stranger. The consent and the trigger are the same event, seconds apart. That said — see the disclaimer at the bottom of this page; we are describing how we built the product, not giving you legal advice.
Not the one the customer dialed. When texting goes live, the text comes from a texting number of your own: a local number in your area code, registered to your business through the filing described above. Your business line stays exactly where it is and keeps ringing as it does now. US carriers do not let texting software send from a number on a mobile plan, which is where many contractors keep their business line. So the caller dials one number and hears back from another. It works because the text opens with your business name and thanks them for calling. A text from a toll-free line or an unfamiliar area code reads as spam and gets ignored or reported, which is bad for you and bad for the carrier campaign.
If your business is yours alone and not an LLC, a corporation or a partnership, you register as a sole proprietor, in your own name: the legal-identity step of the setup guide asks whether your business has an EIN, and No opens that form. An LLC, even with one owner, a corporation or a partnership registers as a business with an EIN, which the IRS issues free online. Once the registration is filed, the carriers text a one-time code to your own mobile, and it goes no further until you enter it. The carriers allow a sole proprietor one texting number and one campaign, about 1,000 texts a day to T-Mobile customers and 15 a minute to AT&T's, and the same mobile on at most three such registrations. None of that is near binding for missed-call replies. A business name or website with a word such as LLC, Inc, Company, Group, Home or Management in it cannot register this way. Everything except texting works from day one regardless.
When one is rejected we tell you what the rejection actually said and what to change, and re-file it with you. Most rejections are boring, and they are your own details rather than the message: a business name that does not match state records, an address typo, a website that does not mention the business. Those re-register your business with the carriers, which costs their $4.50 ($4.50 for a sole proprietor), at cost (the fees Telnyx, our texting provider, publishes on its price list, checked October 2026). The other kind is the carriers objecting to the messaging wording. That wording is ours, and you read and approve it before it is filed; we correct it before anything goes back, and nothing is re-filed unchanged. The re-file is still yours, at the carriers' price and paid before it goes in: $19.50, their review again and the new campaign’s first three months (a sole proprietor's registration holds one campaign, so its campaign re-file registers the details again too: $25.50). You do not get handed an error code either way.
Not through our platform. Marketing to a list, even a list of your own past customers, is a different consent category with different requirements, and it is not what this product is for. If that is what you want, talk to a lawyer and use a tool built for it. A review request after a job you did is treated as a promotion by us, so its text has its own box. It is what HurraBell™ sends once review requests are switched on for the account: one request to that customer in your words, by email and, only where they ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, by text once your own texting number is live.
No. NapkinPrice works from the first day, whatever your registration is doing: the price on your customer's screen and the email telling you about the lead go without it. The estimate email to the customer and the follow-up email are not switched on for new accounts yet, and they never need your registration either. The one text it can ever send is an optional follow-up to a customer who ticked a box asking for it, and that one waits for your registration to cover marketing texts. Every new lead is emailed to you and lands in your dashboard inbox, which is where you go to work it.
You do. Every inquiry, every message and every opt-out is timestamped and exportable. If you ever leave us you take the full record with you — that is exactly the sort of thing you want in a file if anyone ever asks a question about it.
We do, per contractor, in that contractor's legal business name — from the day our carrier account is live, same as for a direct customer. You collect the business details from your client as part of onboarding; we handle the submission, the follow-up and any resubmission, which your client pays for at the carriers' price, as it pays the registration. Details are on the partner program page.
Yes, regularly — both the FCC rules and the carrier requirements move. That is a good argument for having somebody else responsible for tracking them. We update our handling when they change and we do not charge extra for it.
This is not legal advice
We build software, we are not lawyers, and nothing on this page is legal advice or a legal opinion. It is a plain-English description of how our product is designed and what we do on your behalf, written to be useful rather than exhaustive.
Federal rules and state rules both change, and state texting law in particular varies a lot. Using our platform does not transfer legal responsibility for your messages to us, and it is not a defense. If you are running a large SMS program, doing anything beyond replying to inbound inquiries, or you have already received a complaint, talk to a lawyer who practices in this area. Questions about how our handling works: support@tailgateoffice.com or the contact form.
We file the paperwork. You answer the fence lady.
Consent scoping and quiet hours run today; once filing opens we file your carrier registration from the setup guide after you have paid the carrier’s fee at cost, and STOP handling is built in when texting switches on. 30-day trial, no card.