# Avochato

> Avochato is a business messaging platform combining a shared team inbox, two-way SMS and MMS, broadcast campaigns, voice, live chat, and RCS with Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams integrations and an AI agent for first-touch automation; it prices by usage rather than by seat, offering a $0 platform fee tier at $0.08 per segment that includes five users and a $210 per month tier that drops the rate to $0.03 per segment, with additional users at $42 a month and SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance available.

- Category: SMS Marketing (https://saastracker.org/categories/sms-marketing)
- Website: https://www.avochato.com
- Starting price: $0 per month platform fee, then $0.08 per segment
- Free plan: No
- Free trial: Self-serve free trial available
- Founded: 2016, HQ: San Francisco, California, Ownership: Venture-backed
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/avochato

## Overview

Avochato was founded in San Francisco in 2016 by Alex De Simone and Christopher Neale and raised roughly $5.9M, including a $4.93M Series A in October 2018 led by Amity Ventures. It has stayed small, around eighteen people, and unlike most of its 2016 cohort has neither been acquired nor pivoted into an adjacent category. The customer base clusters in operations-heavy businesses: staffing, logistics, transportation, education, professional services, and any team where a group of people needs to reach a group of customers by text and then handle what comes back.

The job Avochato does is general business texting and two-way conversation. It is not an ecommerce SMS marketing platform, has no cart data model, and offers no revenue attribution. What distinguishes it in a crowded field is the pricing shape. Almost every conversational messaging tool charges per seat, which punishes exactly the businesses that most need a team on one number: dispatchers, front desks, recruiters, and coordinators who each touch a few conversations a day. Avochato includes five users on every published tier and charges for messages instead, which inverts the usual penalty.

The two published tiers are genuinely different products in disguise. The Flexible plan has no monthly platform fee at all and charges $0.08 per segment for US and Canadian messages, which suits a business under roughly 2,000 segments a month and means an idle month costs literally nothing. The Standard plan is $210 a month and drops the rate to $0.03 per segment, which becomes the cheaper option somewhere just above 2,000 segments and stays cheaper indefinitely. Both include five users. Premium is quoted and adds volume discounting above 15,000 segments a month, faster broadcast rates, higher API throughput, Salesforce integration, business associate agreements for HIPAA, and nonprofit discounts.

Feature-wise it is broad rather than deep. Broadcast SMS and MMS with personalization, a shared inbox with assignment and internal notes, voice calling, website live chat, RCS for rich branded messages, and analytics cover most of what a service business needs. Avo AI, the optional AI layer, automates first touch and routing before escalating to a human, and is billed against an account balance rather than being included. SOC 2 certification and HIPAA compliance are in place, which is the entry ticket for healthcare and education buyers, though the business associate agreement itself is a Premium-tier item.

## How it works

1. You start a self-serve free trial and pick a tier. Flexible costs nothing monthly and bills $0.08 per segment; Standard is $210 a month at $0.03 per segment with an 18 percent saving on annual billing. Both include five users, and additional users are $42 a month each.

2. You provision a number and complete A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration before sending at volume, or take a toll-free number and complete free toll-free verification, which takes one to five business days and sometimes longer. Registration fees come from The Campaign Registry: roughly $4 for brand registration, campaign vetting from about $15, and $1.50 to $10 a month per campaign by use case, plus per-message carrier surcharges of about $0.003 per US segment.

3. You import or capture contacts with documented consent, tag them, and build the segments you will broadcast to. Opt-out keywords unsubscribe automatically and are enforced on later sends.

4. Broadcasts go out with personalization and scheduling, and replies land in the shared inbox where the team assigns conversations, leaves internal notes, and works them together rather than one person owning the number.

5. Avo AI handles first touch as an optional add-on: it answers, qualifies, and routes, then escalates to a human when the conversation needs one. It is billed from an account balance on top of your tier.

6. Integrations push the record outward. Salesforce logs activity and lets reps text from a record, Slack and Microsoft Teams bring conversations into internal channels, Okta handles single sign-on, and Zapier plus webhooks and the API cover everything else.

## Best for

Operations teams of five or fewer core users that need a shared number with real conversation handling and either send very little or send a lot, since the two-tier structure serves both ends well, and Salesforce-centred teams in staffing, logistics, education, and healthcare that need SOC 2 and HIPAA without a per-seat bill.

## Not the right fit for

- Ecommerce brands measuring SMS in attributed revenue; there is no cart model, no order attribution, and no DTC subscriber acquisition tooling, so Postscript, Emotive, or Recart answers a question Avochato does not.
- Large agent teams; five users are included but the sixth costs $42 a month, so a twenty-person desk pays $630 in seats on top of usage, which is worse than the per-seat platforms it appears to undercut.
- Marketing teams sending large promotional volume on the Flexible tier; at $0.08 per segment a 20,000-message campaign is $1,600, which is absurd next to a credit-based marketing platform.
- Buyers who need the Salesforce integration or a HIPAA business associate agreement on a published price; both sit on the quoted Premium tier rather than on Flexible or Standard.
- Developers wanting a messaging API as the product; Avochato has an API and webhooks but you would be paying for an inbox application you never open.

## Features

### Shared inbox and team collaboration

The core, and built for a group of people sharing one number.

- **Shared team inbox**: Every conversation visible to the team rather than trapped on one person's phone, with five users included on every published tier.
- **Conversation assignment**: Route or claim a thread so two people do not answer the same customer, and so accountability for a reply is explicit.
- **Internal notes**: Colleagues add context to a thread without the customer seeing it, which is what turns a text inbox into a handover-safe workflow.
- **Tags and contact organization**: Label contacts and conversations to drive segmentation and reporting later rather than searching text bodies.
- **Mobile and desktop access**: Field staff and office staff work the same queue, which matters for dispatch, logistics, and service businesses.

### Messaging channels

Wider than SMS alone, without the omnichannel sprawl of an enterprise suite.

- **Two-way SMS**: Standard business texting on a 10DLC or toll-free number, billed per segment rather than per seat.
- **Broadcast SMS and MMS**: Bulk sends with personalization and scheduling, with faster broadcast rates available on the Premium tier.
- **RCS**: Rich branded messaging with verified sender identity where the carrier and handset support it, which raises trust on a channel that badly needs it.
- **Voice**: Call customers directly from the platform, so a conversation that outgrows text does not force a channel switch to a different tool.
- **Live chat**: Website visitor chat feeding the same inbox as texting, so a web enquiry and a text from the same person are one conversation.

### Automation and AI

Avo AI plus rules, sold as an add-on rather than bundled.

- **Avo AI first-touch automation**: Answers and qualifies inbound messages automatically before a human is involved, then escalates. Available on all tiers but billed from an account balance.
- **AI-driven routing**: Inbound conversations are directed to the right person or queue based on content rather than round-robin.
- **Auto-replies and scheduling**: Immediate acknowledgement on inbound and scheduled outbound, which is the practical mechanism for respecting quiet hours across time zones.
- **Automatic opt-out handling**: STOP and equivalent replies unsubscribe the contact and are enforced on subsequent broadcasts, as carriers require.
- **Higher API throughput on Premium**: Rate limits lift on the quoted tier, which matters for programmatic sending against a large contact base.

### Integrations

Salesforce-first, which is unusual for a tool at this price.

- **Salesforce**: Log texting activity against records and send from inside a record. This is a Premium-tier feature, so budget for a quote if it is a requirement.
- **Slack**: Send and receive customer messages in Slack channels, so a team already living there does not need a second window.
- **Microsoft Teams**: Track customer communications inside Teams for organizations standardized on the Microsoft stack.
- **Okta**: Single sign-on through an identity provider, which is what IT asks for before approving another tool.
- **Zapier**: Connects to thousands of applications without a developer, covering CRM, forms, and scheduling triggers.
- **Webhooks and custom API**: Programmatic sending and event delivery for teams building their own workflows on top.

### Compliance, security, and reporting

Enough to clear regulated procurement, with the paperwork on the top tier.

- **SOC 2 certification**: Independently audited, which is normally the first question an IT reviewer asks about a messaging vendor.
- **HIPAA compliance**: Available for healthcare use, with business associate agreements offered on the Premium tier.
- **A2P 10DLC registration support**: Brand and campaign registration handled through the platform rather than left to the customer to navigate alone.
- **Analytics and reporting**: Performance tracking across broadcasts, response rates, and team activity.
- **Nonprofit discounting**: Available on the Premium tier, alongside volume discounting above 15,000 segments a month.

## Use cases

- **Staffing agency coordinating shift workers**: Four recruiters need to text hundreds of candidates about shifts, and every per-seat platform quotes a price that assumes each recruiter is a full-time agent. Outcome: Five users are included at no per-seat cost, broadcasts fill shifts quickly, and replies land in a shared inbox with assignment so no candidate is answered twice or not at all.
- **Seasonal business with a dead half-year**: Texting matters intensely for five months and not at all for the other seven, and a monthly platform fee for an idle account is money burned. Outcome: The Flexible tier has a $0 platform fee, so the off-season costs nothing at all, and the account switches to Standard at $210 when volume climbs past roughly 2,000 segments a month.
- **Salesforce-run professional services firm**: Client communication needs to be logged against the record, and reps will not use a tool that lives outside the CRM they are measured in. Outcome: The Premium-tier Salesforce integration logs activity and lets reps text from a record, with Okta single sign-on satisfying IT and SOC 2 satisfying the security review.
- **Logistics dispatcher handling inbound and outbound**: Drivers text, customers text, and everything currently arrives on one overloaded phone with no record of who replied to what. Outcome: Assignment, internal notes, and tags turn the queue into a workflow, voice calling covers the escalations text cannot handle, and Slack integration keeps the office informed without a second login.

## Pricing

Usage-based pricing per message segment with five users included on every published tier, offered either with no platform fee at a higher rate or with a monthly platform fee at a much lower rate.

- **Flexible**: $0 per month platform fee, plus $0.08 per segment. No monthly platform fee at all; $0.08 per US or Canadian segment; 5 users included; Shared inbox, broadcasts, and automations; Best under about 2,000 segments a month. An idle month costs nothing, which no other platform in this category offers.
- **Standard**: $210 per month, plus $0.03 per segment. $0.03 per US or Canadian segment; 5 users included; Full inbox, broadcast, voice, and chat feature set; 18 percent saving on annual billing; Best above about 2,000 segments a month. The crossover point against Flexible sits just above 2,000 segments a month; below that you are paying $210 for nothing.
- **Premium**: Custom quoted. Volume discounting above 15,000 segments a month; Faster broadcast rates and higher API throughput; Salesforce integration; Business associate agreements for HIPAA; Nonprofit discounts, professional services, and dedicated account management. The only non-self-serve tier, and the one where Salesforce and HIPAA paperwork live.

Add-ons:

- Additional users ($42 per user per month): Five are included; the sixth and beyond are billed, which is where large teams stop being cheap here.
- Avo AI (Billed against an account balance): Available on all tiers as an optional layer rather than bundled into the platform fee.

Billing notes:

- Two tiers, one decision: below roughly 2,000 segments a month the $0 platform fee at $0.08 a segment wins, above it the $210 platform fee at $0.03 a segment wins. Work out your monthly segment count before choosing, because getting it wrong costs meaningful money in either direction.
- Pricing is per segment, not per message, which is the honest unit. A 160-character GSM message is one segment. Add a single emoji or curly quote and the message re-encodes as unicode, cutting the segment to 70 characters, so a 150-character message with one emoji becomes three segments and costs three times what you budgeted.
- Five users are included on both published tiers, which is unusually generous. Every user past the fifth is $42 a month, which is where the model stops being cheap: a fifteen-person team pays $420 in seats on top of usage.
- Annual billing on Standard saves 18 percent.
- Volume discounting starts above 15,000 segments a month and is only available on the quoted Premium tier.
- The Salesforce integration and HIPAA business associate agreements sit on Premium, not on the published tiers, so a regulated or CRM-centred buyer should treat the published prices as a floor rather than a quote.
- Avo AI is billed from an account balance rather than included, so the AI layer is a separate variable cost on top of segments and seats.
- US carrier pass-through of roughly $0.003 per segment and A2P 10DLC campaign fees of $1.50 to $10 a month apply on top of Avochato's rate, as with every US SMS vendor.
- Avochato does not publish a rollover policy, which is largely moot on Flexible since there is no allowance to lose, but worth confirming on Standard.

Value assessment: Avochato's pricing is the most thoughtfully shaped in this batch, and it rewards exactly two kinds of buyer. If you send very little, the Flexible tier costs nothing to keep open and gives five people a shared inbox, which is remarkable value for a seasonal or occasional texter. If you send a lot with a small core team, $210 a month at $0.03 a segment with five users included undercuts every per-seat competitor: Heymarket would charge $245 for five seats on annual billing before a single message, and Textline's $349 Pro plan includes five agents but only 2,000 credits that inbound traffic also consumes. The model breaks in two places. Large teams get punished at $42 per additional user, which quickly erases the advantage. And the two features most likely to be non-negotiable for a serious buyer, Salesforce and a HIPAA business associate agreement, both live behind a quote. Evaluate honestly whether you are the five-user case; if you are, this is the best price in the category, and if you are not, the published numbers are misleading.

## Strengths

- Five users included on every published tier, which inverts the usual per-seat penalty on teams that share one number.
- A genuine $0 platform fee option, so a seasonal or low-volume business pays nothing during quiet months, which nothing else in this category offers.
- At $0.03 a segment with five users for $210, the high-volume tier undercuts every per-seat conversational platform on total cost for a small core team.
- Voice, live chat, and RCS alongside SMS, so a conversation that outgrows text does not force a switch to another vendor.
- SOC 2 certified with HIPAA compliance available, plus Okta single sign-on, which clears the security review at most mid-sized organizations.
- Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams integrations that are properly built rather than Zapier stubs, which is unusual for a company of eighteen people.
- Independent and stable since 2016 in a category where several competitors have been acquired and shut down.

## Limitations

- The sixth user costs $42 a month, so the pricing advantage evaporates for any team larger than five and reverses above about ten.
- The Salesforce integration and HIPAA business associate agreement are Premium-tier items requiring a quote, which undercuts the self-serve story for exactly the buyers who need them.
- Avo AI is billed separately from an account balance, so the headline tier price is not the whole cost once you turn on the AI layer.
- No ecommerce data model or revenue attribution, so it cannot answer the question an ecommerce marketer most wants answered.
- No WhatsApp or Apple Messages for Business, so the channel set is narrower than Heymarket's despite covering voice and chat.
- Small company of roughly eighteen people on under $6M raised, which means modest roadmap velocity and thin support depth compared with CPaaS-owned rivals.

## Comparisons

- **Avochato vs Heymarket**: Heymarket charges $49 per user per month on annual billing with a two-seat minimum plus credits at about $0.03 each, and carries WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and social channels. Avochato includes five users on a $0 or $210 platform fee and charges $0.03 a segment at volume. For five people or fewer Avochato is dramatically cheaper; for channel breadth, granular roles, and CRM sync on published pricing, Heymarket is the better-built product.
- **Avochato vs Textline**: Textline bundles three agents and 600 credits for $149 or five agents and 2,000 credits for $349, and bills inbound messages as well as outbound. Avochato includes five users and bills only per segment sent. Textline earns the premium with NPS and CSAT surveys, ticket-style resolution, and a stronger compliance package on published tiers; Avochato wins on raw cost for the same team size.
- **Avochato vs Salesmsg**: Salesmsg is built around sales workflow with calling and deep HubSpot and ActiveCampaign automation. Avochato is built around operational conversation with Salesforce, Slack, and Teams. If your team lives in HubSpot and texting advances deals, Salesmsg fits better; if your team is dispatching, coordinating, or recruiting and Salesforce is the system of record, Avochato costs less and connects to the right place.
- **Avochato vs Twilio Messaging**: Twilio is the messaging API underneath much of this category: $0.0083 a segment plus carrier fees, with no inbox, no consent management, and no campaign interface. Avochato is the application a non-developer actually uses, at roughly four times the per-segment price on Standard. If you have engineers and are building your own workflow, Twilio is a tenth of the cost. If you have a dispatcher and a front desk, Avochato is the thing they can operate.
- **Avochato vs Sakari**: Both are mid-market business texting platforms with strong integration stories and neither is an ecommerce marketing tool. Sakari is credit-priced with international reach and deep automation-platform connectivity. Avochato's differentiators are five included users, a genuine zero-fee tier, and voice plus live chat in the same product. Compare on team size first: at five or fewer users Avochato usually wins on price.

## Implementation

- Setup time: A day to get a team messaging, one to three weeks of calendar time to send at volume, because A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration or toll-free verification sits in the middle and neither is under the vendor's control.
- Learning curve: Low. The inbox is conventional and the tier structure is simple enough that the main decision, Flexible versus Standard, is arithmetic rather than judgement. Configuring routing and Avo AI escalation rules is the part worth spending time on.
- Onboarding: Self-serve free trial on Flexible and Standard. Premium involves a sales conversation and adds professional services and dedicated account management. Because five users are included, you can put the whole team in during the trial rather than evaluating with one login.
- Migration: Number porting is the slow step in any SMS migration and should begin before the old service lapses. Import contacts with your original consent evidence, since a CSV does not carry TCPA consent by itself. If Salesforce or a HIPAA business associate agreement is a requirement, secure the Premium quote before migrating, because those are not available on the published tiers you would otherwise start on.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web application, iOS app, Android app, API and webhooks
- API: Custom API and webhooks for programmatic sending and event delivery, with higher throughput limits on the Premium tier, plus Zapier for no-code connections.
- Compliance: SOC 2, HIPAA (business associate agreements on Premium), TCPA consent workflows, A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration
- Data residency: US-based infrastructure; no regional hosting options advertised.
- SSO: Okta single sign-on supported.
- Security notes: SOC 2 certified with enterprise security controls and HIPAA compliance available. Opt-out keywords are enforced automatically on outbound broadcasts. Request the current SOC 2 report and, for healthcare, the business associate agreement terms before go-live, since the agreement is a Premium-tier item.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, In-app support, Dedicated account management on Premium, Professional services on Premium
- Documentation: Product and integration documentation at avochato.com covering inbox setup, broadcasts, Avo AI, Salesforce, Slack, Teams, and the API.
- Community: No large public user forum; support is direct.

## Company

- Founded: 2016
- Founders: Alex De Simone, Christopher Neale
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California
- Ownership: Venture-backed
- Employees: Approximately 18 (2026)
- Funding: Approximately $5.9M raised across two rounds, including a $4.93M Series A in October 2018 led by Amity Ventures.

Funding history:

- Seed (2017): Not disclosed. Early backing following the 2016 founding.
- Series A (2018): $4.93M. Led by Amity Ventures in October; total funding stands at roughly $5.9M.

Timeline:

- 2016: Founded in San Francisco by Alex De Simone and Christopher Neale as a shared-inbox business texting platform.
- 2018: Raises a $4.93M Series A led by Amity Ventures in October, bringing total funding to roughly $5.9M.
- 2020: Adds Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams integrations, positioning the product for operations teams inside larger organizations.
- 2021: US carriers make A2P 10DLC registration mandatory; Avochato adds managed brand and campaign registration.
- 2026: Ships Avo AI for first-touch automation and routing, adds RCS support, and settles on a two-tier usage-based pricing model with five users included on both.

## Integrations

Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Okta, Zapier, Webhooks, Custom API

## FAQ

### What is Avochato?

Avochato is a business messaging platform with a shared team inbox for two-way SMS and MMS, broadcast campaigns, voice calling, website live chat, and RCS, plus Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams integrations and an optional AI agent for first-touch automation. It prices by message segment rather than by seat and includes five users on every published tier.

### How much does Avochato cost?

There are two published tiers. Flexible has no monthly platform fee and charges $0.08 per US or Canadian segment, which suits businesses under roughly 2,000 segments a month. Standard is $210 a month and charges $0.03 per segment, with 18 percent off on annual billing. Both include five users; additional users are $42 a month. Premium is quoted and adds volume discounting above 15,000 segments a month.

### Which Avochato tier should I choose?

It is pure arithmetic. Multiply your expected monthly segments by $0.08 and compare that with $210 plus segments at $0.03. The crossover sits just above 2,000 segments a month. Below it you are paying $210 for nothing on Standard; above it you are overpaying by cents per message on Flexible. Estimate segments rather than messages, because emoji and long messages multiply the count.

### How many users are included?

Five, on both published tiers, which is the single most distinctive thing about Avochato's pricing. Every user past the fifth costs $42 a month. That makes it excellent value for a team of five or fewer sharing one number and increasingly poor value above ten, where per-seat competitors with better inbox tooling become competitive again.

### How are segments counted?

A message using standard GSM characters gets 160 characters per segment. Insert a single emoji, curly quote, or other unicode character and the entire message re-encodes, cutting the per-segment budget to 70 characters. A 150-character message with one emoji therefore becomes three segments and costs three times as much. MMS costs more again. This is a carrier rule that applies to every vendor in this category.

### Is Avochato HIPAA compliant?

Avochato is SOC 2 certified and offers HIPAA compliance, but the business associate agreement sits on the quoted Premium tier rather than on the self-serve plans. If you are handling protected health information, treat the published prices as a starting point and get the Premium quote before you commit to a workflow.

### Does Avochato integrate with Salesforce?

Yes, and it is one of the better Salesforce integrations at this end of the market: activity logging against records and sending from inside a record. The caveat is that it is a Premium-tier feature, so it is not available on the $0 or $210 published plans and requires a quote.

### Is Avochato good for SMS marketing campaigns?

It can broadcast competently, but it is a business texting platform rather than a marketing platform. There is no ecommerce data model, no revenue attribution, and no subscriber acquisition tooling. On the Flexible tier at $0.08 a segment, a large promotional send is prohibitively expensive; on Standard at $0.03 it is merely uncompetitive against credit-based marketing platforms.

### What does A2P 10DLC registration cost?

The fees come from The Campaign Registry and the carriers, not from Avochato, and are passed through: roughly $4 for brand registration, campaign vetting from about $15, and $1.50 to $10 a month per campaign depending on use case, plus per-message carrier surcharges of around $0.003 per US segment. Toll-free numbers avoid 10DLC but need free verification that takes one to five business days and sometimes longer, and unverified toll-free traffic is blocked.

### Who owns Avochato and how stable is it?

Avochato was founded in San Francisco in 2016 by Alex De Simone and Christopher Neale and remains independent with roughly $5.9M raised, including a $4.93M Series A in 2018 led by Amity Ventures. It employs about eighteen people. It is small, but it has neither been acquired nor shut down in a category where both have happened to competitors.

## Editorial verdict

Avochato is the cost answer for a small team that shares a number. Five users included on every published tier, a Flexible plan that costs literally nothing during a quiet month, and $0.03 a segment at $210 once volume arrives is a pricing shape nobody else in this category offers, and for a dispatcher's desk, a recruiting team, or a seasonal operation it beats every per-seat competitor on total cost. The product backs it up reasonably: voice and live chat alongside SMS, real Salesforce, Slack, and Teams integrations, SOC 2, and an AI layer for first touch. Two things should temper the enthusiasm. The sixth user at $42 a month reverses the advantage quickly, and the two features a serious buyer is most likely to require, Salesforce and a HIPAA business associate agreement, are both behind a Premium quote rather than on the plans you can actually sign up for. Work out your user count and your segment count first. If the answer is five or fewer users, buy it. If it is fifteen, the price you were attracted by is not the price you will pay.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology