GoHighLevel Text 2 Pay: Setup, Fees & Uses (2026)

By Dr Priya Jaganathan, GoHighLevel Certified Admin · HL Growth Partner, Australia · Updated 17 August 2026 · 10 min read

GoHighLevel Text 2 Pay is a small feature with an outsized effect on cash collection: it sends a live payment link by SMS (or email) straight into a conversation thread, so a customer can pay from their phone in under a minute. That is the whole product. It is not a payment processor, not a proposal tool, and no replacement for your order forms. It is an invoice with a delivery mechanism attached, and that mechanism happens to be the channel Australians actually read.

I set this up regularly for tradie, clinic and services sub-accounts and the pattern is consistent. Where a business previously emailed an invoice and waited four to nine days, text-to-pay commonly collapses that to same-day on deposits and small-ticket work. Where it disappoints is high-ticket B2B, anything needing a second decision-maker's approval, and any list where SMS consent was never properly captured. Below: how HighLevel Text 2 Pay works, what it genuinely costs once you stack Stripe fees, SMS segments and any agency rebilling margin, and the Workflow recipe I use for the reminder sequence.

What GoHighLevel Text 2 Pay actually does

Text 2 Pay creates an invoice inside your sub-account and delivers the hosted payment link by SMS, email, or both. The customer taps the link, lands on a HighLevel-hosted invoice page, pays by card (or whichever methods your Stripe account has enabled), and the invoice status flips to Paid. That status change matters, because it is available as a Workflow trigger. You can fire it from three places.

From the contact or conversation screen

Open a contact, choose Text 2 Pay, pick a product or type an ad-hoc amount, confirm the sending number, send. This is the in-the-moment case: the customer is on the phone or standing in front of you and you want the money committed before the conversation ends.

From the Invoices module

Build a proper invoice with line items, tax, due date and terms, then send it by SMS as well as email. Same invoice object, two channels — useful when the amount needs itemising but you still want the phone nudge.

From a Workflow

This is where it earns its keep. A Workflow action generates and sends the Text 2 Pay link automatically when a trigger fires — an opportunity moves to "Quote accepted", an appointment is marked Showed, a form is submitted, a tag is applied. No staff member touches it. If you already run GoHighLevel two-way SMS conversations, the link lands in the thread the customer is already replying in, which lifts response rates versus a cold outbound message.

How to enable Text 2 Pay in your sub-account

Five things must be in place. Miss one and the option either greys out or sends a broken link.

1. Connect Stripe

Payments → Integrations, and connect Stripe for that sub-account. Each sub-account needs its own connection — this does not inherit from the agency. Confirm you are in live mode, because a test-mode connection sends links that take real customers to a page which cannot charge them.

2. Set up products and prices

Payments → Products. Create your most common items — "Callout deposit", "Initial consult", "Event ticket" — with fixed prices. Ad-hoc amounts work, but products stop staff typing $45 when they meant $450.

3. Configure tax

Add your GST rate under tax settings and attach it to products where it applies — before you send a single invoice. Retrofitting GST across issued invoices is miserable and your bookkeeper will find it. Sort the GoHighLevel Xero integration early too, so paid invoices reconcile without manual re-entry.

4. Sort the sending number and compliance

You need a provisioned LC Phone (or Twilio) number capable of SMS. In Australia that means an ACMA-appropriate setup and, if you send to US numbers, A2P 10DLC campaign registration. Domestically the Spam Act still applies: consent, sender identification, functional unsubscribe. See GoHighLevel SMS compliance for Australia and ACMA before you bulk-send anything payment-related.

5. Fund the wallet

SMS is billed from the sub-account wallet, and an empty wallet means messages silently fail. Set auto-recharge and a low-balance alert — this is the most common cause of "the feature stopped working".

The real fee stack: what Text 2 Pay costs per collection

There is no separate charge for the feature itself. The cost is a stack, and agencies reselling to clients add one more layer.

Worked example: a $450 invoice

Assume an indicative Stripe domestic card rate of 1.75% + $0.30 (confirm the current figure — see Stripe's Australian pricing). Processing on $450 is roughly $7.88 + $0.30 = $8.18. Add four SMS segments across the initial send and one reminder, a few cents each, so under $0.50 at typical AU rates. Total cost to collect: about $8.60, or 1.9% of the invoice. Against chasing $450 for a fortnight, that is cheap.

Worked example: a $2,000 invoice

Same assumptions: 1.75% of $2,000 is $35.00, plus $0.30, plus the same sub-$0.50 of SMS. Total around $35.80, or roughly 1.8%. The percentage barely moves — card processing is close to linear, so text-to-pay does not get proportionally dearer at higher values. What changes is the psychology. Few customers pay $2,000 off a text with nothing preceding it, which is why this sits behind a signed quote rather than in front of one.

Those rates are illustrative arithmetic only. Confirm processing fees on the Stripe pricing page and platform costs on the GoHighLevel pricing page, and check SMS rates in your own sub-account wallet — they vary by country, carrier and reseller arrangement.

Where Text 2 Pay wins — and where it fails

Four situations where it consistently works

Deposits on accepted quotes. A tradie quotes $3,800, the customer says yes on the phone, and the office sends a $500 booking deposit link before hanging up. Job locked, calendar protected.

In-chair upsells for clinics. Practitioner recommends a product or package, front desk sends the link, patient pays while putting their shoes on. No terminal queue.

Event and workshop bookings. Enquiry arrives by phone, seat is held, link goes out with a short expiry. Far fewer no-shows than "I'll book online later".

Debt recovery on overdue invoices. The highest-yield use I see. Emailed reminders get filtered; a polite SMS with a one-tap link recovers a meaningful share of 30-plus-day receivables. The mechanics behind GoHighLevel abandoned cart recovery apply here — timing and friction removal do most of the work.

Four situations where it falls flat

High-ticket B2B. A $40,000 engagement is not paid off a text. There is procurement, a PO number, often bank transfer terms. A payment link sent too early reads as amateur.

Anything needing a real proposal. If the buyer needs scope, options, inclusions and exclusions in front of them, send a document first. Use GoHighLevel proposals and estimates for the decision, then Text 2 Pay for the collection once they have signed.

Badly formatted messages. No business name, no context, a raw link — that gets read as a scam. Name the business, reference the job or invoice number, state the amount.

Unconsented lists. Payment SMS to contacts who never opted in is a compliance exposure and a fast route to carrier filtering. If consent is thin, use email first and earn the SMS channel.

A Workflow recipe for automated collection

This is the sequence I install as a snapshot component so it drops into any new sub-account. Adjust timings to your payment cycle.

Trigger: Opportunity Status Changed → stage moves to "Quote Accepted". Alternatively, Invoice Sent, or a deposit-due tag being applied.

Action 1 — Send Text 2 Pay. Deliver the invoice or payment link by SMS with a message under 160 characters including the link. Something like: "Hi {{contact.first_name}}, it's Sam from Northside Plumbing. Your $500 booking deposit for Tue 9am: [link]. Reply STOP to opt out." Send the same thing by email in parallel.

Action 2 — Wait. 24 hours, or 4 hours for same-day bookings.

Action 3 — If/Else on payment status. If the invoice is paid, exit to the paid branch. If not, continue.

Action 4 — Reminder. A shorter, warmer SMS, then a second at 72 hours. Three chase messages is the ceiling; beyond that you are training people to ignore you.

Action 5 — Escalate to a human. Still unpaid at 96 hours: create a task for the account owner, move the opportunity to "Payment follow-up", apply a payment-overdue tag. A phone call recovers what automation cannot.

Paid branch. On payment: update the custom field deposit_paid_date, apply a deposit-paid tag, remove payment-overdue, move the opportunity to Won or Scheduled, notify the operations channel, and send a receipt-plus-next-steps SMS. Skip this branch and payments land while tags, fields and pipeline stages never update — at which point your reporting is fiction.

If you run Conversation AI in the sub-account, exclude payment threads from autonomous replies. An AI improvising about refunds or amounts is a liability you do not need.

Choosing between Text 2 Pay, invoices and order forms

Give staff a one-line rule. Text 2 Pay is for a known contact, a known amount and an immediate collection. A full invoice is for anything needing itemisation, GST breakdown, PO references or recurring schedules. An order form is for strangers arriving from ads or a funnel, where you also want upsells and bumps. Cold traffic gets the order form; a customer who just said yes on the phone gets Text 2 Pay; anything an accounts department will process goes out as an invoice.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Leaving Stripe in test mode after setup, so every link sent looks fine internally but cannot take a real payment.
• Letting the sub-account wallet run dry with no auto-recharge, which silently kills SMS delivery with no obvious error for staff.
• Sending a bare payment link with no business name, job reference or amount — it reads as a scam, gets ignored, and sometimes gets reported.
• Writing long messages with emoji, which drops you to ~70 characters per segment and quietly doubles or triples your SMS spend per send.
• Configuring GST after invoices have already gone out, then trying to reconcile mismatched tax across issued records.
• Running more than three automated chase messages, or texting contacts with no documented consent — both invite complaints and carrier filtering.

If you want Text 2 Pay, invoicing and payment recovery wired into your GoHighLevel workflows properly, book a strategy call with the HL Growth Partner team.

Book Your Strategy Call →

Frequently asked questions

Does GoHighLevel Text 2 Pay cost extra on top of my plan?

There is no separate feature fee. You pay Stripe's processing percentage plus fixed fee on each successful charge, the per-segment SMS cost from your sub-account wallet, and the monthly number rental. If your agency rebills wallet usage with a markup, that margin applies too. Confirm current figures on Stripe's pricing page and in your own wallet settings.

Can I send Text 2 Pay from a Workflow instead of manually?

Yes, and you should for anything repeatable. Add the Text 2 Pay or invoice action inside a Workflow triggered by a pipeline stage change, invoice status, form submission or tag. Manual sending is fine for one-offs; automation is what makes deposit collection and overdue recovery consistent.

Which payment methods work with text-to-pay in Australia?

Whatever your connected Stripe account has enabled — typically Visa, Mastercard, Amex and the digital wallets. The hosted invoice page inherits your Stripe configuration, so enable wallets in Stripe if you want Apple Pay and Google Pay showing, since they lift mobile conversion noticeably.

What happens if the customer never pays the link?

The invoice stays open indefinitely unless you set a due date or void it. Build the exit into your Workflow: after two or three reminders, tag the contact, move the opportunity to a follow-up stage, and create a task for a human call. Do not leave automated reminders looping.

Do I need A2P 10DLC registration to use HighLevel Text 2 Pay?

A2P 10DLC applies to messaging US numbers and is required there. For Australian sending you are governed by ACMA rules and the Spam Act — consent, clear sender identification and a working opt-out. Either way, complete registration and compliance setup before your first send, not after deliverability drops. Verify current requirements in the GoHighLevel help documentation.

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