# SlickText

> SlickText is a US SMS and MMS marketing platform sold on credit-based monthly plans that start at $29 for 500 credits, combining mass campaigns, text-to-join keywords, a two-way team inbox, drip and abandoned-cart workflows, segmentation, and Shopify revenue attribution; it is unusual in the category for including local 10DLC, toll-free, and short code numbers in the plan price rather than charging separately for each, and for rolling unused credits over for a month on monthly billing and a full year on annual billing.

- Category: SMS Marketing (https://saastracker.org/categories/sms-marketing)
- Website: https://www.slicktext.com
- Starting price: $29 per month for 500 credits
- Free plan: No
- Free trial: 14 days, all features, no credit card required
- Founded: 2012, HQ: Jamestown, New York, with a second headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, Ownership: PE-owned (Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital)
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/slicktext

## Overview

SlickText was founded in Jamestown, New York in 2012, an unglamorous town for a SaaS company and a fact the vendor leans into. It added a second headquarters in Nashville in 2020 and was acquired in September 2018 by the private equity firms Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital, which is worth knowing because it explains the shape of the company: roughly 40 people, profitable, no venture pressure to chase enterprise, and a product that has been iterated steadily rather than rebuilt. The vendor cites more than 15,000 businesses using it across retail, ecommerce, restaurants, education, healthcare, coaching, and course creation.

The job SlickText does is ecommerce-flavoured general SMS marketing. It sits between a pure conversational texting tool and a Shopify-native revenue platform. You get the marketing machinery, which is campaigns, keywords, segments, drip workflows, A/B testing, birthday triggers, link tracking, and MMS up to 1,600 characters, plus a Shopify integration that tracks web sessions, product views, and cart status and reports revenue attribution alongside click-through and subscriber growth. You also get a two-way inbox with tags, statuses, assignment rules, and after-hours autoresponders, so support conversations do not have to move to another tool.

Pricing is a straight credit ladder and it is published in full. Starter is $29 a month for 500 credits, Professional $49 for 1,000, Business $79 for 2,000, Growth $129 for 3,500, Scale $169 for 5,000, then Enterprise Lite at $319 for 10,000, Enterprise at $579 for 25,000, and Enterprise Plus at $939 for 50,000. Annual billing gives two months free. A standard SMS segment is one credit, MMS is three credits per segment, and incoming texts are free. Rollover is the structural detail worth planning around: unused credits carry forward one month on monthly plans and a full year on annual plans, which is the most generous rollover policy published in this category.

The two things a buyer should verify before signing are the carrier pass-through and the compliance workload. SlickText states that carrier fees apply on top of credits and vary by number type, country, and message format, but it does not publish a per-message figure, so budget roughly $0.003 per segment for US carrier surcharges on 10DLC traffic and confirm the actual rate with support. On compliance, SlickText handles brand and campaign registration for you as a white-glove step and ships double opt-in, age verification, consent management, and AI opt-out recognition, which is more compliance tooling than most tools at this price include.

## How it works

1. You start a 14-day free trial with no credit card, pick a plan by credit volume, and get one premium sending number included. Unlike platforms that charge $10 a month for a local number and thousands for a short code, SlickText folds 10DLC, toll-free, and short code provisioning into the plan price, with RCS as the only paid extra at $500 one-time plus $200 a year.

2. Before you can send at volume you register for A2P 10DLC, which is a US carrier requirement and not a SlickText invention. SlickText submits your brand and campaign to The Campaign Registry on your behalf. Budget roughly $4 for brand registration, $15 or more per campaign vetting, and $1.50 to $10 a month per campaign depending on use case, all passed through. If you take a toll-free number instead, verification is free but takes one to five business days and can stretch to two weeks, and unverified toll-free traffic is blocked by the aggregator.

3. You grow a list. Contacts opt in by texting a keyword to your number, through web signup forms and popups, through the Shopify checkout, or by import with documented consent. Double opt-in and age verification are available for regulated categories such as alcohol and cannabis.

4. You segment and send. Segments are built on custom fields and real-time behaviour including page views, product views, and cart status when Shopify is connected. Workflows handle welcome series, drip sequences, abandoned cart recovery, review requests, and birthday messages, with A/B testing on message variants.

5. Replies land in the two-way inbox, where tags, statuses, and assignment rules route them to the right person and autoresponders cover after hours. Reporting closes the loop with click-through rates, subscriber growth, workflow performance, response times, and revenue attribution.

## Best for

Small and mid-sized US businesses that want real SMS marketing machinery rather than a plain texting inbox, especially Shopify merchants under roughly 50,000 messages a month who want revenue attribution without an ecommerce-platform contract, and any team that sends in lumpy bursts and wants unused credits to roll over.

## Not the right fit for

- High-volume ecommerce brands sending hundreds of thousands of messages a month; at 50,000 credits for $939 you are paying nearly two cents a message, which is two to three times what a per-message ecommerce platform charges at that scale.
- Developers who want a messaging API as their primary interface; SlickText has a REST API and webhooks, but you are paying for a marketing application you will mostly not use.
- Businesses whose main need is one-to-one support conversation volume with many agents; the credit model charges for outbound conversation turns that a per-seat inbox tool like Textline or Heymarket bundles differently.
- Companies sending mostly outside the US and Canada; SlickText is built around US carrier compliance and does not present itself as an international messaging platform.
- Anyone who needs a hard, published, per-message carrier surcharge number in writing before signing; SlickText says carrier fees apply and vary but does not publish the rate, unlike SimpleTexting.

## Features

### Campaigns and list growth

The outbound marketing surface, which is where most of the value sits.

- **Mass text campaigns**: Send SMS or MMS to a whole list or a segment, scheduled or immediate, with personalization from custom fields.
- **Text-to-join keywords**: Customers subscribe by texting a word to your number, which triggers a customized autoresponse or drops them into a workflow.
- **Web signup forms and popups**: Capture opt-ins from your site rather than only from in-store or printed calls to action.
- **MMS up to 1,600 characters**: Attach images, GIFs, and video, and use the 1,600-character body that MMS allows instead of the 160-character SMS segment. Each MMS segment costs three credits.
- **A/B testing**: Test message variants inside workflows rather than guessing which offer copy converts.
- **Link tracking**: Shortened, tracked links so click-through is measured per campaign rather than inferred from site traffic.

### Automation and segmentation

Workflows and targeting, the part that separates this from a bulk sender.

- **Workflows**: Multi-step automations covering welcome series, drip messaging, abandoned cart recovery, review collection, and birthday triggers.
- **Behavioural segmentation**: Build segments on custom fields and real-time behaviour, including page views, product views, and cart status when Shopify is connected.
- **Unlimited custom fields**: Store arbitrary contact data and target on it, on every paid plan.
- **Unlimited contacts**: Plans meter messages, not list size, so growing a large subscriber base does not by itself raise the bill. Sending to it does.
- **AI Compose**: Drafts message copy when nobody on a two-person marketing team wants to write the fourteenth promotion of the quarter.
- **Conversational AI agents**: Collect data from subscribers through a back-and-forth exchange rather than a single-question autoresponse.

### Two-way inbox

Conversation handling, competent rather than best in class.

- **Shared team inbox**: Inbound replies are worked by a team rather than landing in one person's phone, with tags and statuses for triage.
- **Assignment rules**: Automatically route inbound conversations to the right person or queue instead of relying on whoever notices first.
- **After-hours autoresponses**: Set expectations automatically outside business hours, which matters because SMS carries an implicit promise of immediacy.
- **Free incoming texts**: Inbound messages do not consume credits on any plan, so a conversational campaign does not double your cost.

### Compliance and deliverability

More consent tooling than most tools at this price ship.

- **White-glove number registration**: SlickText handles A2P 10DLC brand and campaign submission to The Campaign Registry rather than handing you a form and wishing you luck.
- **Double opt-in**: Confirm consent with a reply before a contact is subscribed, which is the defensible standard under TCPA scrutiny.
- **Age verification**: Gate subscription by age for alcohol, cannabis, gaming, and other restricted categories.
- **AI opt-out intelligence**: Recognizes opt-out intent beyond the literal STOP keyword, so a subscriber who texts a plain sentence asking to be removed is actually removed.
- **Consent management**: Consent state and its source are tracked per contact, which is what you need when a complaint arrives.
- **Every number type included**: 10DLC, toll-free, and short code provisioning are included in the plan price. Short codes normally cost $1,000 a month or more elsewhere and take six to eight weeks, so this is the single most unusual line on the pricing page.

### Integrations and reporting

Where SMS results become numbers someone else will believe.

- **Shopify integration**: Web session tracking, product and cart events, and automations triggered by browse and cart behaviour, plus revenue attribution in reporting.
- **Revenue attribution reporting**: Attributed revenue sits alongside click-through, subscriber growth, workflow performance, and response times in real-time reports.
- **Native connectors**: Mailchimp and Salesforce among others, so SMS consent and engagement are visible where the rest of the marketing data lives.
- **Zapier and Make**: Roughly 7,000 additional apps reachable without a developer.
- **REST API and webhooks**: For sending, contact sync, and event delivery when the native connectors do not cover your stack.

## Use cases

- **Shopify merchant doing $2M a year**: Email revenue has plateaued, an ecommerce SMS platform quotes a twelve-month commitment, and the merchant sends maybe 20,000 messages a month across launches and cart recovery. Outcome: Enterprise Lite at $319 for 10,000 credits or Enterprise at $579 for 25,000 covers the volume with cart and browse abandonment workflows and revenue attribution, on a monthly plan with rollover and no contract.
- **Multi-location restaurant group**: Wants text-to-join at the table, a weekly special to subscribers, and replies handled by a shift manager rather than the owner's phone. Outcome: Keywords capture opt-ins on table tents, segments split the list by location, and the shared inbox with assignment rules puts replies in front of whoever is on shift.
- **Course creator with a launch calendar**: Sends nothing for six weeks then sends heavily for ten days, and every credit-based platform they have tried burned the unused allowance each month. Outcome: Annual billing rolls unused credits for a full year, so the quiet months bank the credits the launch weeks consume, and two months free lowers the effective rate.
- **Regional retailer with a cannabis or alcohol category**: Needs demonstrable consent and age gating because the compliance exposure on a restricted category is not theoretical. Outcome: Double opt-in plus age verification plus per-contact consent records give a defensible audit trail, and AI opt-out recognition catches removal requests that do not use the word STOP.

## Pricing

Credit-based monthly subscription across eight published tiers, with one SMS segment costing one credit and MMS costing three credits per segment, plus carrier fees passed through.

- **Starter**: $29 per month for 500 credits. 500 message credits; Unlimited contacts; Free incoming texts; One premium sending number included; Rollover credits.
- **Professional**: $49 per month for 1,000 credits. 1,000 message credits; Full feature set; Live phone, chat, and email support.
- **Business**: $79 per month for 2,000 credits. 2,000 message credits; Workflows and segmentation; Shopify integration.
- **Growth**: $129 per month for 3,500 credits. 3,500 message credits; Complimentary one-to-one onboarding session.
- **Scale**: $169 per month for 5,000 credits. 5,000 message credits; Onboarding included.
- **Enterprise Lite**: $319 per month for 10,000 credits. 10,000 message credits; Onboarding included.
- **Enterprise**: $579 per month for 25,000 credits. 25,000 message credits; Dedicated customer success manager.
- **Enterprise Plus**: $939 per month for 50,000 credits. 50,000 message credits; Dedicated customer success manager. Above this, SlickText quotes custom volume. At 50,000 credits you are paying about 1.9 cents a credit before carrier fees.

Add-ons:

- RCS messaging ($500 one-time setup plus $200 per year)

Billing notes:

- Credit accounting is what drives your bill. One 160-character SMS segment is one credit. An MMS segment is three credits, so a picture message costs triple even if the text is short.
- Segment counting is the trap nobody reads about until the invoice arrives. A plain GSM message gets 160 characters per segment, but a single emoji or a curly quote forces unicode encoding and cuts the budget to 70 characters per segment. A 150-character message with one emoji becomes three segments and three credits.
- Incoming texts are free on every plan, which makes conversational and reply-driven campaigns cheaper here than on platforms that bill inbound.
- Rollover is the friendliest in the category: unused credits carry one month on monthly billing and a full year on annual billing. Annual billing also gives two months free.
- Carrier fees apply on top of credits and vary by number type, country, and SMS versus MMS. SlickText does not publish a per-message figure, so plan on roughly $0.003 per segment for US 10DLC carrier surcharges and confirm the exact rate with support before you commit.
- A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration fees are set by The Campaign Registry, not SlickText: budget around $4 for brand registration, $15 or more per campaign vetting, and $1.50 to $10 per month per campaign by use case.
- Sending numbers are included rather than billed separately, including short codes, which elsewhere run $1,000 a month or more and take six to eight weeks to provision.
- Onboarding is bundled from the $129 Growth plan up, and a dedicated success manager from $579, so the higher tiers buy service as well as credits.

Value assessment: At the small end SlickText is priced fairly rather than cheaply. Starter at $29 for 500 credits works out to 5.8 cents a credit, which is a lot of money per message compared with a raw API, and the honest answer is that you are not buying messages, you are buying workflows, consent tooling, Shopify attribution, a shared inbox, and a phone number you do not have to fight a carrier for. The included short code alone is worth more than the plan fee for the handful of businesses that need one. The curve improves fast: Enterprise Plus at $939 for 50,000 credits is about 1.9 cents, which is competitive with mid-market SMS platforms and still generous on features. Where it stops making sense is above roughly 100,000 messages a month, where per-message ecommerce platforms and CPaaS providers are simply cheaper. The rollover policy is the quiet differentiator, and for any business with a lumpy sending calendar it is worth more than a small discount from a competitor.

## Strengths

- Every number type is included in the plan price, including short codes, which is genuinely unusual and saves the businesses that need one four figures a month.
- The best rollover terms published in this category: one month on monthly plans, a full year on annual plans.
- Real marketing automation rather than a bulk sender, with workflows, behavioural segmentation on Shopify events, A/B testing, and revenue attribution in reporting.
- Compliance tooling that goes past the minimum, including double opt-in, age verification, consent records, and AI recognition of opt-out intent phrased in plain English.
- Managed A2P 10DLC registration, which removes the single most common reason a small business fails to get SMS launched at all.
- Free incoming texts on every plan, which makes two-way and reply-driven campaigns materially cheaper than on inbound-billing rivals.
- PE-owned, profitable, roughly 40 people, and fourteen years old, which is a boring and reassuring shape for a vendor you are trusting with a phone number.

## Limitations

- Carrier pass-through fees are acknowledged but not published as a rate, so your true per-message cost is not knowable from the pricing page alone.
- Credit pricing at the entry tiers is expensive per message, and anyone sending above roughly 100,000 a month should be looking at per-message platforms instead.
- The inbox is competent but shallower than a dedicated conversational platform: no WhatsApp, no Apple Messages for Business, and less sophisticated agent routing than Heymarket or Textline.
- Ecommerce depth stops at Shopify. There is no equivalent native model for WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or a headless stack beyond the API.
- Coverage and compliance are framed around the US and Canada, so international sending is not the product's strength.
- MMS at three credits per segment makes image-heavy campaigns expensive quickly, and the pricing page does not make that arithmetic obvious.

## Comparisons

- **SlickText vs SimpleTexting**: Both are credit-based general texting platforms at a similar price, and the differences are structural. SimpleTexting publishes its carrier pass-through precisely, includes three user seats, and rolls credits over one month. SlickText includes every number type in the plan price including short codes, rolls credits for a full year on annual billing, and has the stronger ecommerce and automation layer. Choose SimpleTexting if the shared inbox and cost transparency matter most; choose SlickText if you are running marketing workflows against a Shopify store.
- **SlickText vs Textedly**: Textedly starts cheaper, has a free plan, and gives every feature on every tier, but charges $10 per additional teammate and adds a telecom surcharge on top of the plan. SlickText starts at $29, includes short codes and toll-free numbers, and has the deeper Shopify and workflow story. Take Textedly if you want the lowest possible entry cost and a free tier to test with; take SlickText if the automation and attribution layer is the point.
- **SlickText vs EZ Texting**: EZ Texting is the closest direct analogue: mass texting, keywords, an inbox, and a long US track record. SlickText's advantages are the year-long rollover on annual plans, the included short code, and the behavioural Shopify segmentation. Compare them on the number type you actually need and on how lumpy your sending calendar is, because the rollover policy is where the money is.
- **SlickText vs Postscript**: Postscript is a Shopify-native SMS revenue platform priced around what SMS earns, with far deeper ecommerce data, subscriber acquisition, and attribution than SlickText. SlickText is a general marketing platform with a good Shopify integration bolted to it. If SMS is your primary revenue channel and Shopify is your whole business, Postscript wins. If SMS is one channel among several and you want a monthly plan with no commitment, SlickText is the cheaper and less demanding choice.
- **SlickText vs Heymarket**: Heymarket is a per-seat conversational messaging platform across SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and social, priced from $49 per user per month with credits bought separately. SlickText is a per-credit marketing platform with an inbox attached. If your volume is conversations handled by agents, Heymarket is the right shape; if your volume is outbound campaigns to a subscriber list, SlickText costs a fraction as much.
- **SlickText vs Recart**: Recart is a Shopify-only SMS platform starting at $299 a month on a commitment, built entirely around opt-in popups, DTC flows, and revenue. SlickText starts at $29 with no commitment and serves any industry. A DTC brand with real subscriber growth ambitions gets more from Recart; a store that wants cart recovery texts without a four-figure annual decision should start with SlickText.

## Implementation

- Setup time: An afternoon to send your first campaign, but plan one to two 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 SlickText's control.
- Learning curve: Low for campaigns and keywords, moderate for workflows and behavioural segmentation. The Shopify event triggers are the part worth reading the documentation for.
- Onboarding: Fully self-serve with a 14-day trial and no credit card. Complimentary one-to-one onboarding is included from the $129 Growth plan up, and a dedicated customer success manager from $579.
- Migration: Contacts import with consent records, but consent does not transfer as a legal matter simply because a CSV did: keep the original opt-in evidence. Number porting from another provider is possible and is the slow part of any SMS migration, so start it before you cancel the old contract. If you are moving from a platform where you own a short code, confirm the port path first, since short code transfers are the most involved case.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web application, Mobile-responsive web, REST API, Webhooks
- API: REST API and webhooks for sending, contact management, and event delivery, plus Zapier and Make for no-code automation across roughly 7,000 apps.
- Compliance: TCPA consent workflows, CTIA messaging guidelines, A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration, Double opt-in and age verification
- Data residency: US-based infrastructure; no regional hosting options advertised.
- SSO: Not advertised on published plans.
- Security notes: Consent state and its source are recorded per contact, opt-out intent is detected beyond the literal STOP keyword, and number registration is handled by SlickText rather than left to the customer. Security certifications are not published on the marketing site, so ask for current attestations if you are in a regulated category.

## Support

- Channels: Live phone support, Live chat, Email, One-to-one onboarding from the Growth plan, Dedicated success manager from the Enterprise plan
- Documentation: Help center and guides at slicktext.com covering workflows, segmentation, keywords, compliance, and the Shopify integration.
- Community: No large public user forum; support is direct rather than community-mediated.

## Company

- Founded: 2012
- Headquarters: Jamestown, New York, with a second headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee
- Ownership: PE-owned (Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital)
- Employees: Approximately 42 (2026)
- Funding: Acquired in September 2018 by Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital; no venture rounds disclosed before or since.

Funding history:

- Acquisition (2018): Not disclosed. Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital acquired Slick Innovations, the company behind SlickText.

Timeline:

- 2012: Founded in Jamestown, New York as a text marketing platform for small businesses.
- 2018: Acquired by private equity firms Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital in September.
- 2020: Opens a second headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee.
- 2021: US carriers make A2P 10DLC registration mandatory, and SlickText moves to handling brand and campaign submission for customers as a managed step.
- 2026: Ships RCS as a paid add-on, AI Compose, conversational AI agents, and AI-driven opt-out recognition alongside the existing workflow engine.

## Integrations

Shopify, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, REST API, Webhooks

## FAQ

### What is SlickText?

SlickText is a US SMS and MMS marketing platform for small and mid-sized businesses. It combines mass text campaigns, text-to-join keywords, drip and abandoned-cart workflows, behavioural segmentation, a two-way team inbox, and Shopify revenue attribution, sold on credit-based monthly plans that start at $29 for 500 credits.

### How much does SlickText cost?

Plans run from $29 a month for 500 credits up to $939 for 50,000 credits, with published tiers at $49, $79, $129, $169, $319, and $579 in between. Annual billing gives two months free. There is a 14-day free trial with no credit card and no free plan. Carrier fees and A2P 10DLC registration fees are passed through on top.

### How are SlickText credits counted?

One 160-character SMS segment is one credit. An MMS segment is three credits and allows up to 1,600 characters. Incoming texts are free on every plan. The trap is encoding: a single emoji or curly quote forces unicode, which cuts the segment size from 160 characters to 70, so a message you thought was one credit can quietly become three.

### Do unused SlickText credits roll over?

Yes, and this is the most generous rollover in the category. Unused credits carry forward one month on monthly plans and a full year on annual plans. If your sending is seasonal, annual billing means the quiet months bank credits that the busy months spend, rather than burning them.

### Does SlickText charge extra for a phone number or a short code?

No. One premium sending number is included, and 10DLC, toll-free, and short code provisioning are all included in the plan price. That is unusual: short codes typically cost $1,000 a month or more and take six to eight weeks to provision elsewhere. RCS is the exception, at $500 one-time plus $200 a year.

### What does A2P 10DLC registration cost and how long does it take?

The fees come from The Campaign Registry and the carriers, not from SlickText, and they are passed through. Budget roughly $4 for brand registration, $15 or more per campaign vetting, and $1.50 to $10 a month per campaign depending on use case, with per-message carrier surcharges around $0.003 per segment on top. Registration typically takes a few days to two weeks. SlickText handles the submission for you, which is the main reason small businesses actually get through it.

### Is SlickText good for Shopify stores?

It is good for stores of moderate size. The Shopify integration tracks web sessions, product views, and cart status, drives abandoned cart and browse workflows, and reports attributed revenue. What it is not is a Shopify-native revenue platform of the Postscript or Recart kind, with their deeper subscriber acquisition and attribution machinery. Below roughly 50,000 messages a month, SlickText is usually the cheaper and simpler answer.

### Does SlickText handle TCPA compliance for me?

It gives you the tools, which is not the same as taking on the liability. Double opt-in, age verification, per-contact consent records with source, quiet-hours-aware scheduling, and AI opt-out recognition that catches removal requests phrased in plain English are all included. The legal responsibility for how you collected consent stays with you, and importing a list you cannot document is the most common way small businesses get into trouble.

### What is the real per-message cost including carrier fees?

Take the credit price for your tier, then add carrier pass-through of roughly $0.003 per US segment, then add the monthly A2P campaign fee spread across your volume. At Starter that means about 5.8 cents a credit plus carrier fees; at Enterprise Plus it is about 1.9 cents plus carrier fees. SlickText does not publish the exact carrier surcharge, so confirm it with support before you model a large campaign.

### Who owns SlickText?

SlickText was founded in Jamestown, New York in 2012 and has been owned since September 2018 by the private equity firms Iron Creek Partners and Main Street Capital. It employs roughly 42 people across offices in Jamestown and Nashville and has no disclosed venture funding.

## Editorial verdict

SlickText is the general SMS marketing platform to shortlist when your sending calendar is uneven and your store runs on Shopify. Two things on the pricing page do real work: every number type including short codes is bundled into the plan fee, and unused credits roll over for a month on monthly billing or a full year on annual. Both quietly save more money than the headline price differences between competitors. The product itself is a proper marketing tool, with workflows, behavioural segmentation, A/B testing, attribution, and more consent tooling than the price suggests. The reservations are the unpublished carrier pass-through, a two-way inbox that is competent rather than best in class, and a credit model that stops being competitive above roughly 100,000 messages a month. Below that line, for a business that wants marketing rather than telecom, it is one of the better buys in the category.

---

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