You bought a business texting number, loaded your canvass list, sent 300 texts about a savings estimate — and almost nobody replied. Your pitch was fine; the messages never arrived, because in 2026 US carriers block unregistered business texting, and solar is a vertical they watch hardest.
A2P stands for application-to-person: any text sent by software (a CRM, a follow-up tool, a Twilio script) rather than typed by a human on a handset. 10DLC means 10-digit long code — the normal local numbers businesses text from. Around 2021, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon decided businesses texting from local numbers had to identify themselves first, and The Campaign Registry (TCR) is where you do it: a Brand (your legal identity) and a Campaign (what you text, with real samples and your opt-in story).
10DLC is not a law; it is a carrier requirement. It sits alongside — not instead of — the consent rules in our TCPA guide for solar sales reps and the state-by-state SMS rules hub.
Carrier spam filters are trained on complaint data, and years of lead-gen operators blasting “FREE SOLAR, NO COST TO YOU” taught the models to treat solar vocabulary as high-risk. A legitimate solar sales team doing honest follow-up inherits that rough neighborhood: unregistered solar traffic is filtered near-instantly, and even registered traffic gets extra content scrutiny. Registration is how you separate yourself from the operators the filters were built for.
You register through your messaging provider (Twilio, Telnyx, Bandwidth), which passes it to TCR. You will need:
If you have no EIN (a 1099 rep operating personally), Sole Proprietor registration exists but is capped at very low volume and filtered hardest. If you sell under a real entity, register the entity.
The campaign is where solar companies get rejected, so slow down here. Most solar teams fit Mixed (marketing plus customer care), or Low Volume Mixed under about 2,000 messages a day (roughly $1.50 to $2 a month vs. about $10 to $12 for Marketing/Mixed). Picking “Customer Care” to save a few dollars while your samples clearly show marketing is a fast rejection.
“Sunrise Solar sends appointment confirmations, follow-ups after in-person consultations, savings-estimate delivery, and installation status updates to homeowners who requested a solar quote via our website form or in person from a company representative. Recipients opt in at the time of the quote request. All messages identify Sunrise Solar and include opt-out instructions.”
Submit 2 to 5 samples that look exactly like what you send, with bracketed placeholders and opt-out language in at least one:
Vetters treat these as deceptive marketing. Say “savings estimate” or “$0-down financing options,” never “free.”
Third-party lead generation and affiliate marketing are prohibited 10DLC content categories. Describe yourself as the installer or dealer contacting your own prospects — never as someone who generates or resells solar leads.
Any sample implying you are the utility, or that the ITC is a government check, is an instant fail — and a TCPA lawsuit magnet on top.
The campaign form asks how recipients consent. “We buy aged leads” is both a vetting fail and, as our solar TCPA guide covers, not legal consent anyway.
If your site has no visible SMS disclosure or privacy policy mentioning texting, add one before submitting.
| Trust score (approx.) | Tier | T-Mobile daily cap | What it means for a solar team |
|---|---|---|---|
| 75 to 100 | Top | ~200,000/day | Effectively unlimited for any dealer |
| 50 to 74 | Upper-mid | ~40,000/day | Plenty for multi-crew regional companies |
| 25 to 49 | Lower-mid | ~10,000/day | Fine for a typical 5 to 20 rep shop |
| 0 to 24 | Low | ~2,000/day | Small teams; external vetting can raise it |
| Sole Proprietor | Bottom | ~1,000/day | Heavy filtering — last resort without an EIN |
TCR assigns a trust score from 0 to 100 that sets your sending capacity: T-Mobile publishes hard daily caps, AT&T limits rate per minute by campaign class, Verizon filters on reputation. If your score lands low, optional external vetting (roughly $40 one-time) can re-score the brand — but for most solar companies the lower-mid tier is already more capacity than they use, so do not overpay to chase a number you do not need.
On a web form, an unticked checkbox: “I agree to receive text messages from Sunrise Solar about my quote. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply STOP to opt out.” At the door, the rep confirms “I'll text you the estimate at this number, that ok?” and logs it. STOP, CANCEL, and QUIT must immediately and permanently suppress the number — your provider catches the keyword; your job is to never text that number again.
The first message of a thread and any blast carries the footer: “Sunrise Solar. Msg & data rates may apply. Msg frequency varies. Reply HELP for help, STOP to opt out.”
Since mid-2023, Twilio blocks unregistered US-bound 10DLC traffic at the API with error 30034 — the message dies before it reaches a carrier. Traffic that slips through on other providers gets filtered (error 30007 territory), and every filtered message damages the number’s reputation further, so by the time you register you may be ramping a burned number out of a hole. Our Twilio deliverability guide covers diagnosing that spiral.
The math is simple: registration costs about $20 up front and a few dollars a month; one filtered blast to 500 canvassed homeowners costs the blast, the leads, and the number. The same brand-then-campaign process covers adjacent trades too — roofing and home security work identically.
FollowUp was built for exactly this rep. On the Autopilot tier, every account gets a dedicated 10DLC-registered business number with the brand and campaign registration already done — follow-ups, savings estimates, and confirmations go out on carrier-trusted infrastructure from day one. No TCR forms, no vetting queue, no error 30034.
Yes. Any solar company sending business SMS to US numbers from a standard 10-digit local number must register its brand and campaign through The Campaign Registry (TCR). Unregistered solar traffic is filtered or blocked outright by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon in 2026, and Twilio rejects it with error 30034 before it even reaches a carrier.
Brand registration is a $4 one-time fee. Campaign registration adds a one-time vetting fee of approximately $15, plus a recurring monthly fee of roughly $1.50 to $12 depending on the use case you pick. Carriers also add small per-message A2P surcharges, typically fractions of a cent per segment.
The most common reasons: sample messages containing “free solar” or “no cost” claims, campaign descriptions that read like lead generation or affiliate marketing (both prohibited content categories), missing opt-in descriptions, sample messages without opt-out language, and mismatches between the brand’s website and what the campaign says it sends.
Brand registration with a valid EIN usually resolves in minutes to a few days. Campaign vetting typically takes a couple of days to a few weeks, longer if reviewers kick it back for content fixes. Budget two to four weeks end to end, and register before the install-season rush, not during it.
Person-to-person texting from your own handset is not A2P traffic, so 10DLC does not apply to a rep manually texting from their iPhone. The moment software sends through a carrier SMS API on your behalf, it is A2P and must be registered. Either way, TCPA consent rules still apply.
This is a general summary, not legal advice.