Linq vs Photon

Photon's free tier is real: unlimited daily messages, RCS and SMS fallback, up to ten users, on a shared managed number pool. Pro is $25 for a hundred users. A dedicated line is $250 per line per month, and the group messaging API is only complete at that tier. Linq publishes no pricing whatsoever at any tier, and both the sandbox and the enterprise plan sit behind a form.

Both publish a status page, which almost nothing else in this comparison does, and both are worth reading against the marketing. Linq states a 99.95% SLA on its API page; its status page reports 99.87% for the V3 and V2 APIs across June to September 2026. Photon's engineering blog argues that if Apple's iMessage is up then Photon's API is up; its status page reports 99.84% for iMessage over the same window. Neither is a breach on the evidence available, because neither publishes what its measurement covers, and the useful move is to ask rather than to conclude.

The security disclosure is where they diverge most. Linq holds SOC 2 Type I and Type II with reports for 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026, runs 70 continuously monitored controls, publishes a vulnerability disclosure process, and names five subprocessors: AWS, Cloudflare, Grafana Labs, Sentry and Hex. Photon's trust centre claims SOC 2 Type 1, Type 2 and HIPAA and lists 25 policies, with zero subprocessors and zero documents published, so there is nothing to request. If a security review is coming, that gap decides this.

Customers are the other divergence, in the opposite direction. Photon names Rho, Vercel, Hermes Agent, Ditto, Fae and FlipText in prose on its own blog, three of which are listings in this directory. Linq publishes a logo wall and a claim of 1,000+ teams, while the coverage of its $20M Series A in February 2026 described 100+ customers and 30 million messages a month. Both sets of figures are the companies' own.

They are also different ages and different shapes. Linq Technologies Incorporated was founded in 2019 by three former Shipt executives and began as a digital business card, which its status page still monitors as a legacy platform. Photon's public code appeared in September 2025 and the framework underneath it is MIT licensed with a few thousand stars, so you can read exactly what it does and run it yourself. The one caution on Linq is that it also operates imessage.store, a competing directory of iMessage agents.