📡 The Big Story
Telgorithm Just Blew Up the Per-Message Pricing Model
On Tuesday, Telgorithm launched an RBM suite with something the industry has been quietly avoiding: session-based billing for Conversational RCS. Not per-message. Not per-segment. Per session. And they're one of the first CPaaS providers to actually pull the trigger on it. 🔥
Here's why this matters more than the press release makes it sound. Per-message pricing worked great when messaging was one-way. Send blast, count segments, invoice. But Conversational RCS with an AI agent on the other end? A single "resolve my order" interaction could easily be 15 to 30 message exchanges. Multiply that by a support volume of 100k conversations a month and suddenly your "cheap" RCS strategy costs more than your call center. Per-message pricing punishes exactly the behavior RCS is supposed to enable.
Session billing flips the incentives. You pay for the conversation, not the chattiness of your bot. Telgorithm also bundled AI fallback (when RCS isn't available, it degrades gracefully to SMS) and their patented Smart Queueing for throughput. Watch Twilio, Sinch, and Bandwidth on this one. If session pricing catches, the whole CPaaS margin structure gets rewritten in the next 18 months. If it doesn't, Telgorithm just did the market a favor by proving nobody wants it. Either way, we finally have a data point.
🔥 What's Moving
TCPA Filings Fall 18.2% in May 👀
After months of "the sky is falling" litigation growth, May TCPA filings dropped 18.2%, with FDCPA down 9.8% and FCRA down 8.2%. First real pullback all year. Is the 2026 lawsuit surge peaking, or is this just plaintiffs' firms taking a Memorial Day breather? Don't celebrate yet. YTD numbers are still elevated, and one month does not a trend make. But if June holds this pattern, we might actually be exiting the post-one-to-one-consent litigation frenzy.
Connecticut Piles On With CDPA Amendments 😴
Connecticut passed two amendment packages: SB 1295 (effective July 1, 2026) expands sensitive data rules and automated decision-making requirements, and SB 4 (October 1) adds a geolocation sales ban and data broker registration. For SMS senders, the profile data and opt-in intersections are real. But honestly? If you're already compliant with California and Colorado, this is more paperwork than paradigm shift. Add it to the pile with the other 19 state privacy laws.
Android Lets You Turn Off SMS/RCS Backup 👀
Google is rolling out toggles letting users disable cloud backup for SMS, MMS, and RCS. Consumer win, sure. But for enterprises building on RCS as a "durable" channel with conversation history that persists across devices? Suddenly that assumption gets shakier. E-discovery teams should be reading this one twice. Also worth noting: if users start turning off backup en masse, the AI training data pipeline just got a haircut.
The IRS Is Now Texting You (For Real This Time) 🤡
For years, every anti-smishing campaign has hammered one rule: "The IRS will never text you." Well, now they do. Congratulations to every scammer out there, you just got a free upgrade. The consumer education problem here is enormous, and it puts even more pressure on carriers to nail sender verification and branded calling/messaging. If we can't make "is this really the IRS" answerable in a glance, smishing losses are going to spike. Guaranteed.
🏆 Winner of the Week: Telgorithm, for having the guts to price RCS the way it should be priced instead of squeezing legacy models into new channels.
📉 Loser of the Week: Every smishing awareness trainer who now has to rewrite their slide deck because the IRS decided rules were more like guidelines.
📊 By the Numbers
- $117 billion: Projected A2P SMS market size by 2035, up from $71.2B in 2024, per a new TMR forecast. That's a 4.6% CAGR despite years of "RCS will kill SMS" takes. Plain text at 160 characters continues to be the cockroach of digital communication. Unkillable.
- 18.2%: May's TCPA filing drop. Sounds huge until you remember filings were up double digits for four straight months before that. The floor is still historically high.
- 2: Number of Connecticut privacy amendment packages compliance teams now have to track in a single year. Multiply that by 20 states and tell me again how "federal preemption is coming any day now."
🔮 What We're Watching
Will other CPaaS providers follow Telgorithm on session pricing? Sinch and Infobip both have RCS roadmaps this quarter. If either one announces a session-based tier by end of Q3, we've officially got a category shift. If they double down on per-message, Telgorithm is on an island.
June TCPA numbers, due late July. One month of decline is noise. Two months and we can start talking about a real trend. Given the summer slowdown pattern historically, I'd bet on a flat or slightly-up June, which would tell us May was seasonal, not structural.
💡 The Hot Take
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: Conversational RCS is going to force the entire CPaaS industry to become AI infrastructure companies, and half of them aren't going to make it.
The old CPaaS moat was carrier relationships, deliverability, and volume pricing. That moat still matters, but it's not enough anymore. When your customer's use case shifts from "send 10 million marketing texts" to "run 10 million AI-driven customer conversations," the winning platform is the one that handles session state, agent orchestration, fallback logic, and per-conversation economics natively. Telgorithm just planted a flag in that ground. Twilio has been telegraphing this pivot for a year but hasn't fully committed on pricing. The mid-tier players either build this stack or they get commoditized into oblivion by 2028.
And the wild part? SMS itself will keep growing right through this transition ($117B by 2035, remember). The base layer isn't going anywhere. But the value, the margin, the moat, all of it moves up the stack. If you're a CPaaS betting on per-segment pricing in 2027, you're the Blockbuster of messaging. Enjoy the late fees.
See you next week. Stay signal, avoid noise. 📡
