Five Vendors, Five Markups. That's Why Your Claims Administrator Costs $25 a Head.

Pull up the last invoice from your claims administrator. Not the summary page. The line items.

Somewhere in there you'll find charges for SMS delivery, charges for e-signature, charges for identity verification, charges for disbursement processing, and probably a line for "platform" or "technology" that covers whatever portal your claimants used. Each of those represents a separate vendor. Each vendor has its own margin. And every one of those margins got passed through to you, stacked on top of the administrator's own fee.

That is not a complaint about greed. It is a description of architecture. And architecture is what determines price.

The Licensing Tax You Never Negotiated

Most legacy claims administrators started as paper-and-mail operations serving class actions. When mass arbitration arrived and demanded SMS outreach, digital document signing, AI-driven communications, and real-time identity verification, those administrators did the rational thing: they went shopping. They licensed an SMS gateway from one company, an e-signature tool from another, a voice platform from a third, KYC from a fourth, disbursement rails from a fifth.

Each vendor in that chain prices for its own profit. The administrator then wraps all five into a single per-claimant fee and adds its own margin on top. By the time that number reaches your engagement letter, it lands somewhere between $20 and $25 per claimant. That is not inflated. It is the honest cost of assembling a stack from parts you do not own.

Now imagine you could skip all five licensing agreements. That is what Send It By Text built, and it is the foundation GroupSettle runs on.

What "Owned Stack" Actually Means

Send It By Text is a communications infrastructure company. It built native document signing, SMS delivery, email orchestration, AI voice, identity verification, and disbursement tooling as core products, not bolt-ons. GroupSettle (MassARB by GroupSettle) is the division that points that entire infrastructure at mass arbitration claims administration.

When a claimant receives an SMS from GroupSettle, that message travels on Send It By Text's own rails. When the claimant signs a release, the document signing happens natively inside the same session, with a full audit trail, no redirect to DocuSign or a third-party e-sign vendor. When the claimant has a question at 2 a.m., the AI super agent (handling north of 80% of inbound inquiries over email and text) runs on the same platform. No licensing fee. No per-message markup from an outside gateway. No margin stacking.

That is why the price is $11.99 per signed claimant. Not because we are subsidizing it. Not because we are buying market share. Because the marginal cost of running each claimant through a stack you already own is fundamentally lower than the cost of routing them through five vendors you rent.

Cheaper Is Nice. But Cheaper Funds the Bet That Actually Matters.

Here is where the owned stack stops being a pricing story and becomes an operational one.

Legacy administrators charge $20 to $25 per claimant, collect that fee whether the matter hits its release threshold or not, and still stall at roughly 50% completion. In the matters we run, we see what everyone in mass arb sees: the first half of completion is easy. Send the notice, collect the low-hanging responses, process the documents. Any competent administrator can get there.

The second half is where matters live or die. The claimants who did not respond to the first SMS. The ones who opened the email but did not sign. The ones who started the release and dropped off halfway through. Getting those people across the line requires persistence: follow-up SMS sequences, email re-engagement, AI voice calls for the late holdouts, and a claimant-facing AI super agent that can answer questions and resolve issues at any hour without burning paralegal time.

Legacy administrators were not built for that kind of campaign. And even if they wanted to run one, the per-touch cost of doing it through licensed vendors makes every additional outreach a line item that erodes their margin. So they stop. The matter stalls. And the firm is left to drag it from 50% to 75, 80, or 85 percent on its own.

GroupSettle can run that persistence engine at or near cost because it owns every layer. That low marginal cost is exactly what allows us to do something no other claims administrator does: charge on contingency. We invoice nothing until your matter hits its release threshold. Miss the number, you owe zero.

Aligned by Design, Not by Promise

When your administrator gets paid regardless of completion, their incentive is to process the easy half efficiently and move on. When your administrator only gets paid if the matter crosses the threshold, their incentive is identical to yours: get to the number.

That alignment is not a philosophy we adopted. It is a consequence of the cost structure. Because we run the engine at cost, we can afford to bet our fee on the outcome. Because we bet our fee on the outcome, we only take matters we believe we can carry to threshold. Because we carry matters to threshold, we see roughly 50% more effectiveness on completion than what firms report from legacy providers.

Every piece connects back to one decision: own the stack instead of renting it.

The Invoice That Should Make You Ask Questions

If your current administrator charges $20 to $25 per claimant, ask them one question: how much of that fee goes to third-party vendors you could name? If they cannot answer clearly, or if the answer is "most of it," you now understand why the price is what it is. And you understand why it does not have to be.

$11.99 per signed claimant. Contingency, so you pay nothing unless the threshold is met. And a completion engine that does not quit at the halfway mark because every additional touch is nearly free to run.

That is not a sales pitch. It is arithmetic.