Is Postscript or Recart cheaper?

Postscript starts at $0 per month on Starter with a $49 minimum spend, then $100 per month on Growth (free plan available). Recart starts at $299 per month on a twelve-month commitment (free trial).

Postscript vs Recart

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Recart compared with Postscript

The direct competitor, and both are Shopify-first ecommerce SMS platforms priced around revenue. Postscript is the larger and more established option with deeper subscriber acquisition, segmentation, and a broader partner ecosystem. Recart's counter is OneClick opt-in and a strategist included in the plan rather than sold separately. If you have in-house SMS expertise and want the deepest platform, Postscript. If list growth is your bottleneck and you want the channel run for you, Recart.

Choose Postscript if

Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants doing enough revenue that a dedicated SMS channel earns its keep, particularly stores with repeat purchase behavior, subscriptions on Recharge, or a Klaviyo email program already running that they want SMS to sit alongside rather than replace.

Choose Recart if

Shopify direct-to-consumer brands doing enough revenue that SMS is expected to be a named channel with its own number, particularly those whose subscriber list is the bottleneck rather than their campaign copy, and merchants who want a strategist included rather than hiring or contracting one.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Postscript	Recart
Category	SMS	SMS
Starting price	$0 per month on Starter with a $49 minimum spend, then $100 per month on Growth (free plan available)	$299 per month on a twelve-month commitment (free trial)
Pricing model	Monthly platform fee that buys a lower per-message rate, plus usage. Carrier pass-through fees apply on top of every message on every tier. No per-seat charge and no credit bundles.	Commitment-based monthly subscription with bundled message allotments per tier and overage at published per-message rates, with shorter commitment terms priced higher.
Free plan	Starter carries a $0 platform fee but a $49 minimum monthly spend, so it is a low floor rather than a genuinely free plan; it includes campaigns, automations, unlimited segments, a toll-free number, and two opt-in keywords.	No
Free trial	$100 in credit valid for 30 days, applied against message and carrier fees	No free trial published; onboarding includes a free account setup and SMS audit
Best for	Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants doing enough revenue that a dedicated SMS channel earns its keep, particularly stores with repeat purchase behavior, subscriptions on Recharge, or a Klaviyo email program already running that they want SMS to sit alongside rather than replace.	Shopify direct-to-consumer brands doing enough revenue that SMS is expected to be a named channel with its own number, particularly those whose subscriber list is the bottleneck rather than their campaign copy, and merchants who want a strategist included rather than hiring or contracting one.
Setup time	The app installs and connects to Shopify in under an hour, but you cannot send until carrier registration clears. Toll-free verification typically takes one to three weeks, A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration usually one to four weeks, and a dedicated short code eight to twelve weeks. Plan on two to four weeks from install to first campaign, and start registration on day one.	Days to a working setup once the Shopify app is installed and the strategist has run the audit, but one to three weeks of calendar time before you can send at volume, because A2P 10DLC registration or toll-free verification sits in the middle and neither is under the vendor's control.
Learning curve	Low for campaigns, moderate for automations. The flow builder is approachable but the value sits in the 45 segment filters and 85 trigger filters, and getting real leverage from those means understanding your own Shopify data well enough to know which ones matter. Most merchants get abandoned checkout and welcome flows live in week one and spend a quarter learning the rest.	Low, deliberately. The flow templates are pre-built from tested patterns, the popups are configured rather than designed, and the included strategist absorbs most of the strategic decisions a first-time SMS marketer would otherwise get wrong.
Platforms	Web application, Shopify and Shopify Plus app, US and Canadian SMS and MMS delivery, Toll-free, 10DLC, and dedicated short code	Shopify app, Web application
Compliance	TCPA-aligned consent capture and record keeping, CTIA messaging principles and best practices, A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration, Toll-free verification, Carrier quiet hours enforced by recipient time zone	TCPA consent workflows, A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration, Toll-free verification, Automatic opt-out handling
Founded	2018	2015
Headquarters	Scottsdale, Arizona, United States	Budapest, Hungary
Ownership	Venture-backed	Venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Postscript

Strengths

Shopify-native data model means segments and triggers read order history, line items, discounts, and subscription state directly, with no field mapping and no sync lag to debug.
Compliance is a product feature rather than a disclaimer: quiet hours by recipient time zone are the default, an in-house legal team tracks rule changes, and consent records are stored per subscriber with source and timestamp.
Subscriber collection is unusually deep, and the Onsite Opt-in Network genuinely lifts opt-in rates on stores with no existing list because it recognizes shoppers already in Postscript's base.
Pricing tiers buy a lower per-message rate rather than gating features, so the cost model is transparent arithmetic you can run before signing up.

Limitations

Shopify only. There is no path for WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, or headless commerce, and replatforming means replacing Postscript.
No email channel, so you run it beside Klaviyo, Kit, or similar and reconcile attribution across two systems with different windows.
API access is gated to the $500 Professional tier, which pushes developer-led merchants into a price bracket they may not otherwise need.
The $49 minimum spend on Starter means the entry price is not actually zero, and the platform-fee tiers only pay for themselves at meaningful volume.

Recart

Strengths

OneClick opt-in is a genuine technical differentiator, not a marketing claim about a standard popup, and list growth is the bottleneck for most Shopify brands rather than campaign copy.
Per-message cost of roughly $0.012 to $0.015 all in is close to CPaaS rates and dramatically cheaper than general SMS platform credit pricing.
A dedicated SMS strategist and a setup audit are included in the subscription rather than sold as professional services, which for a small marketing team substitutes for a specialist hire.
Revenue attribution against Shopify order data rather than click-through, which is the only metric that justifies spending on the channel.

Limitations

Shopify only. No WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, or headless support, which eliminates it outright for a large share of ecommerce.
The $299 floor on a twelve-month commitment means $3,588 of contracted spend before messages, with no free trial and no cheap way to test the fit.
Shorter commitment terms are priced higher, so genuine month-to-month flexibility is either unavailable or expensive.
No published rollover policy for unused bundled messages, which matters when you are committing to a year of allotments.

Pricing compared

Postscript

Monthly platform fee that buys a lower per-message rate, plus usage. Carrier pass-through fees apply on top of every message on every tier. No per-seat charge and no credit bundles.

Starter$0
Growth$100
Professional$500
EnterpriseCustom

Postscript is priced for stores where SMS is a real revenue line, not an experiment. On Growth at $100 plus roughly $0.013 all-in per SMS segment, a 25,000-message month costs about $425, which is defensible if attribution shows the channel returning multiples of that and indefensible if it does not. The genuinely good part of the structure is that the platform fee buys a rate reduction rather than a feature unlock, so the decision is arithmetic rather than a negotiation. The bad part is API access sitting behind the $500 Professional tier, which is a strange gate for a platform whose whole pitch is data-native integration. Against general-purpose texting tools charging per credit, Postscript looks expensive at low volume and clearly cheaper at high volume, which is exactly what you would expect from a platform built for stores that send a lot.

Recart

Commitment-based monthly subscription with bundled message allotments per tier and overage at published per-message rates, with shorter commitment terms priced higher.

Starter$299
Pro$499
Scale$999
EnterpriseCustom

Judged per message, Recart is priced well: about $0.012 to $0.015 all in for a US segment, which is close to raw CPaaS cost and a fraction of what a general SMS platform charges per credit, and the allotments at each tier are sized so that a brand actually using the channel is not constantly in overage. Judged as a commitment, it is a serious decision. $299 a month for twelve months is $3,588 contracted before you send anything, and there is no free trial and no month-to-month equivalent at the published rate. What tips the arithmetic is the two things you are not paying for separately: the strategist, which would cost more than the plan as an agency retainer, and the OneClick opt-in machinery, which is the only genuinely proprietary thing in the product. If SMS is going to be a named revenue channel for a Shopify brand and the list is the bottleneck, this is well-priced and the commitment is defensible. If SMS is an experiment, a $29 general platform costs a hundredth as much to find out whether your customers will engage at all, and you can move here once the answer is yes.

Editorial verdict on each

Postscript

Category Leader

Postscript is the strongest SMS platform in the Shopify ecosystem and it is not close, provided you are actually on Shopify and actually sending enough to justify the structure. The native data model, the depth of the segment and trigger filters, the quality of the subscriber collection tooling, and the fact that quiet hours and consent records are defaults rather than settings all reflect a team that has thought about this problem for eight years. The pricing is honest arithmetic: a platform fee that buys a lower per-message rate, with carrier fees disclosed rather than hidden. The reasons to look elsewhere are structural rather than qualitative. You cannot use it off Shopify, it does not send email, API access sits behind a $500 tier, and the $49 minimum spend means a small store is subsidizing capacity it will never use. If you run a Shopify store where SMS is a revenue line rather than an experiment, start here. If you run anything else, this product is not for you and no amount of feature depth changes that.

Read the full Postscript profile

Recart

Recart is the ecommerce SMS platform to look at when your list is the problem. OneClick opt-in is the only genuinely proprietary technology in this batch, the flows and attribution are competent DTC standard, and bundling a strategist into a $299 plan quietly replaces an agency retainer that would cost more than the software. Per message it is priced close to raw carrier cost, which means the plan fee buys software and service rather than marked-up transport. Two constraints decide whether it belongs on your shortlist. It is Shopify only, absolutely, which removes it from consideration for a large share of ecommerce. And the published price assumes a twelve-month commitment with no free trial, so the real entry decision is $3,588 of contracted spend on a channel you may not yet have proven. If SMS already works for your Shopify brand and growing the subscriber base is where the revenue is being left, this is a well-priced and well-focused purchase. If you are still finding out whether your customers want your texts, spend $29 on a general platform first and come back when you know.

Read the full Recart profile

Postscript profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Recart last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.