The 16 providers that carry the messages behind the agents in this directory, and the other pieces they run on. Every price comes from the vendor’s own pricing page with the date we checked it, and nothing here is paid placement.
Flat monthly per number, from €49, with genuinely nothing added per message.
Price from
$49/mo
Number
Dedicated
Can message first
Included
When it breaks
Publishes a status page
Watch The only provider here charging nothing per message, which inverts the comparison at volume. Priced per number, so several numbers means several subscriptions.
A phone number for your agent, voice and messages through one webhook. No iMessage.
Price from
Not published
Number
Dedicated
When it breaks
Publishes a status page
Watch It is in this table for what it is not: a route to iMessage. If your agent has to arrive as a blue bubble, a phone number and a webhook will not get you there, and that distinction is the whole reason the rest of this page exists.
Apple's official programme. Not a general agent API, and you cannot use it directly.
Price from
Not published
Number
Not applicable
Can message first
Not supported
When it breaks
No status page published
Watch Customer-initiated only. A brand cannot start a conversation, and you must reach it through an Apple-approved messaging service provider rather than building against it directly.
Watch Built to bring iMessage to Windows, Linux and Android rather than to serve production agents. There is no SLA, no support contract and no one to call.
iMessage infrastructure for reaching people at scale, with SMS and RCS fallback and no published price.
Price from
Not published
Number
Shared pool
Can message first
Included
When it breaks
No status page published
Watch The pitch is reaching people at scale in the one channel Apple does not sanction for it. The site publishes no price and no compliance certification, and its FAQ says it rotates sending identities and caps each one per day, which is a shared pool by another name. All three are questions to ask before you build on it.
The only metered provider here: $5/month for 250 messages, scaling to $50 for 15,000.
Price from
$5/mo
Number
Dedicated
Can message first
Included
When it breaks
Publishes a status page
Watch Priced by message volume rather than by line, which is the opposite model to everyone else here. Cheap at low volume and the comparison inverts as you scale.
An identity for an agent: an inbox, a phone number, iMessage and an agent-to-agent channel, free to start, shared line until $200 a month.
Price from
Free tier
Number
Both
Can message first
Enterprise only
Watch On the free and $30 plans the agent cannot open an iMessage conversation: recipients must write first, and the shared line is capped by unique recipients per month, 3 and then 10. The first plan where the agent can text somebody new is $200.
The deepest published feature set of any provider here, and no published price at all.
Price from
Not published
When it breaks
Status page, 99.95% SLA
Watch No public pricing at any tier, so you will be talking to sales before you know the cost. And the SLA on the marketing page is 99.95% while Linq's own status page reports 99.87% for the V3 and V2 APIs over June to September 2026.
From $59.99/month, but the ability to message someone first is a $30/month add-on.
Price from
$59.99/mo
Number
Both
Can message first
Paid add-on
When it breaks
Publishes a status page
Watch Initiating conversations is +$30/month, a phone number is +$15/month, and SMS/RCS fallback is +$15/month. The headline price includes none of them.
Cheapest route to a dedicated line's alternative: $25/month on a shared pool, $250 for a dedicated one.
Price from
Free tier
Number
Both
Can message first
Included
When it breaks
Publishes a status page
Publishes its own comparisons against BlueBubbles.
Watch The free and $25 tiers use Photon's shared managed number pool, and a dedicated line is $250/month, a tenfold jump. Its blog says that if Apple's iMessage is up, Photon's API is up; its own status page reports 99.84% for iMessage over June to September 2026.
A messaging platform with seats rather than a raw API, from $79 a month, no per-message fee.
Price from
$79/mo
Number
Dedicated
Can message first
Included
When it breaks
No status page published
Watch Priced per human seat, which is the wrong shape for an autonomous agent. This is an inbox for teams that happens to expose an API, not an API that happens to have an inbox.
Advertises $0 markup on Meta's rate, and charges $0.004 per message in platform usage.
Price from
Free tier
Number
Dedicated
Can message first
Included
When it breaks
Publishes a status page
Watch The $0 markup claim is true of Meta's rate specifically. A separate platform usage charge of $0.004 per message sits alongside it, so the amount you pay above Meta is $0.004, not zero.
A file at the root of a site telling an agent what the service is and how to use it, the way llms.txt tells a model what to read.
Price from
Not published
When it breaks
Publishes a status page
What people have posted about these
KERNEL
@usekernel · 2026-09-10
your browser agents can now complete online purchases without ever touching card data.
agents on KERNEL now pay on checkout pages using aliases, not card data. we swap in the real credential at egress, so card numbers never touch your agent's runtime or context.
Kernel. It is the infrastructure answer to the question every listing here now faces, and it is a different answer from the ones the products give. Flip keeps passwords away from the agent by taking session cookies instead. Instinct's policy describes being handed the password itself. Shuffle takes verification codes and deletes them after the task. This is the same problem moved one layer down, where the credential never enters the model's context at all, which is the only version that survives an agent being talked into something by a web page.
Jeff Weinstein
@jeff_weinstein · 2026-09-10
[@usekernel + @link] for a programatic env for agents to make payments on the internet.
A nifty Kernel feature: card details stay out of the agent's runtime. A card alias is used in browser, then Kernel swaps in the real Link card info when the request egresses the environment.
Kernel. It is the clearest one-line description anybody has published of where a credential should sit when software is spending your money, and it comes from the payment company rather than the infrastructure company, which is the party with the most to lose if the design is wrong. Read next to the same author's post about Tomo the same day, it also shows Stripe pushing on both ends at once: the rail inside a consumer agent, and the rail underneath the browser those agents run in.
Read instead
A filter narrows the set. It does not tell you which headline price is a fiction, and that is what these are for.
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