Every message you send has a price on it
Except one. SMS and WhatsApp bill you per message, so the better your loyalty program does, the more it costs to talk to it. A wallet notification has no per-message fee at all. Here is the arithmetic, with your own numbers, and what each platform actually includes.
Price is only half of it. Getting seen is the other half.
Email is nearly free and nearly ignored. SMS is read and expensive. The useful question is not which is cheapest, it is which gets read for what you pay.
The send cost is one thing. What you already pay for is another.
Your booking or wallet platform probably bundles some messaging. Here is what the main ones give you before any per-message charge starts.
What would your monthly bill be?
Change any of the rates to match what your provider actually charges you.
8,000 messages a month
- Wallet notificationIncluded in your subscriptionNo fee
- EmailPer send or per contact$8
- WhatsAppPer delivered marketing template$240
- SMSPer message$400
This counts send cost only. It does not include your PointVibe subscription, an email platform subscription, or the phone numbers and setup fees an SMS provider will add on top.
The message you send most is the one you pay for most
A salon with 400 appointments a month sends 400 reminders a month, every month, forever. It is almost always the single biggest line in a messaging bill, and it is the one PointVibe can put on the wallet pass instead.
It lands on the card they already have
The reminder goes to the pass in their wallet, the same card that holds their loyalty balance. No new number to recognise, no app, and nothing to open.
You choose the notice
Minutes, hours or days before the appointment. Set it once as an automation and it fires for every booking after that, without you opening it again.
No per-reminder charge
Because it is a wallet notification rather than a text. If somebody has not saved a pass you can still fall back to email or SMS for them specifically.
Where the other channels still win
Wallet notifications are not a replacement for everything, and any page that told you otherwise would be selling rather than explaining.
SMS reaches everybody
It does not care whether somebody saved your pass, installed anything, or opened an email in the last year. For one genuinely urgent message to your whole list, the unit cost is worth it.
Email carries detail
A lock screen holds a sentence. An email holds a menu, a price list, an explanation and three photographs. Different jobs, and email costs almost nothing for the ones it suits.
Wallet only reaches members
That is the honest limit. A wallet notification goes to people who chose to keep your card, so it is your best channel for regulars and no use at all for somebody who never joined.
The awkward questions
There is no per-message charge. Apple and Google do not bill you for delivering a pass update or a lock-screen message, so the cost sits in your subscription rather than in a per-send meter that grows every time your list does. To be straight with you, that is true of wallet passes generally rather than of us specifically. PassEntry includes unlimited push as well. The structural difference is against SMS and WhatsApp, where every single message has a unit cost.
Yes, and for a business that books, that is where the saving actually is. A reminder is a first-class automation: you choose how much notice it gives, minutes, hours or days, and it then fires for every booking without you touching it. Sent to the wallet pass there is no per-message charge, and it lands on the same card that holds the customer's points.
Because it reaches everyone, including the customer who never installed your pass. SMS is the right tool for a genuinely urgent, one-off message to your whole list. It is the wrong tool for a birthday reward you send every day of the year. PointVibe supports all three channels precisely so you can pick per message.
They only reach people who saved your pass. That is the honest limitation. Email and SMS reach anyone whose details you hold, whether or not they ever added a card. In practice you use wallet push for your members and keep email for the wider list.
Since Meta moved to per-message billing in July 2025, every delivered marketing template is charged individually, with no volume discount tier on the marketing category. Utility messages cost substantially less and are free inside a 24-hour customer-initiated window, but a promotional message is billed at the full rate every time.
Wallet first, then email, then SMS. Wallet push costs nothing per send and lands on the lock screen, email is close to free for anything non-urgent, and SMS is kept for the cases that genuinely justify the unit cost. You can override the channel on any individual automation.
Your customers' wallets are waiting
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