Your Admin Charges Per Touch. At 200,000 Claimants, That's a Business Model, Not a Fee.

I had a conversation last week with a partner at a firm running a matter with north of 150,000 signed claimants. Good matter. Strong claims. Solid settlement framework. And an admin bill that was growing faster than the completion rate.

The problem was not the outreach strategy. The problem was the pricing model underneath it.

Their administrator charged per communication touch. Every SMS, every email, every follow-up call, every reminder. Individually, each touch was cheap. At 150,000 claimants across a 180-day window with an average of nine touches per claimant to get a signature, those cheap touches added up to a number that made the partner physically uncomfortable.

This is the part of completion economics that almost nobody talks about until they are already committed.

The Per-Touch Trap at Scale

Most legacy claims administrators price outreach on some version of per-touch billing. They will quote you a reasonable-sounding rate for each SMS sent, each email delivered, each call placed. On a 2,000-claimant matter, the total is manageable. On a 10,000-claimant matter, it starts to sting. On a 100,000-plus matter, it becomes the single largest variable cost in your settlement budget.

Here is the math that catches firms off guard. Take a matter with 200,000 signed claimants and an 85% release threshold. You need 170,000 completed. Industry response curves show that roughly 40% of claimants respond to the first two touches. Another 25% respond between touches three and six. The remaining 20% you need to hit threshold require touches seven through twelve or beyond.

If your admin charges $0.15 per SMS and $0.08 per email, and you are averaging nine touches per claimant across the full window, your outreach cost alone is north of $300,000. That does not include the admin's base fee, document processing, ID verification, or disbursement. And here is the part that makes per-touch pricing genuinely dangerous: your admin has a financial incentive to stop trying after touch six, because every additional touch is a cost center for them unless they are passing it through to you.

The Incentive Problem Nobody Mentions

Think about what per-touch pricing means from your administrator's perspective. If they are eating the cost of outreach as part of a bundled fee, every additional touch to a non-responsive claimant is margin erosion. If they are passing the cost through to you, every additional touch is revenue for them but a line item you will eventually push back on.

Neither incentive structure is aligned with your actual goal, which is hitting the release threshold.

The firms I work with that consistently hit thresholds fastest have figured out something simple: the admin's pricing model has to make the admin want the same outcome you want. If your admin makes the same money whether your completion rate is 72% or 94%, you have a vendor. If your admin makes money only when you cross your threshold, you have a partner.

That is the logic behind threshold-aligned billing. GroupSettle charges a flat $11.99 per signed claimant, and the firm owes nothing until the release threshold is hit. The outreach is not a line item. The SMS is not a line item. The email is not a line item. The AI super agent handling over 80% of claimant inquiries is not a line item. It is all included because the entire business model depends on actually getting claimants across the finish line.

Why Flat Per-Claimant Pricing Only Works If You Own the Stack

There is a reason most administrators do not offer flat per-claimant pricing with unlimited outreach. They cannot afford to.

When your admin licenses its SMS delivery from one vendor, its email platform from another, its e-signature from a third, and its ID verification from a fourth, every single touch has a hard cost attached to it. Those vendors do not care about your release threshold. They charge per API call, per message, per verification. So your admin has to either limit touches (which kills your completion rate) or pass the cost through (which kills your budget).

The only way to offer a flat per-claimant price and still make the economics work is to own the infrastructure. Send It By Text was built as a native document signing, SMS, and email delivery platform specifically so that the marginal cost of touch number eleven is effectively the same as touch number three. When you own the pipes, persistence is not a cost problem. It is a strategy.

The Seven-Figure Swing

Let me put real numbers on this. Take that 200,000-claimant matter with an 85% threshold.

Under a per-touch model at $0.15/SMS and $0.08/email, with an average of nine touches per claimant and a 60/40 SMS-to-email split: that is roughly $0.122 blended per touch, times nine, times 200,000. You are looking at approximately $220,000 in outreach costs alone. Add a $20 per-claimant base admin fee and you are at $4.2 million in total admin spend.

Under a flat $11.99 per-claimant model with no per-touch charges, your total admin spend is $2.4 million. Flat. Regardless of whether a claimant needs three touches or thirteen.

That is a $1.8 million difference on a single matter. And the flat model gives your admin every reason to keep reaching out, because they do not get paid until you hit threshold.

What This Means for Your Next Matter

If you are evaluating a mass arb campaign with more than 50,000 potential claimants, your admin pricing model is not an operational detail. It is a strategic decision that will determine whether your completion campaign is sustainable or whether it slowly bleeds your settlement economics dry.

Three questions to ask before you sign an admin agreement:

1. What is the total cost of outreach if every claimant requires twelve touches to sign? Not the per-touch rate. The total number.
2. Does the admin's revenue increase or decrease when your completion rate goes up? If the answer is "it depends," you have the wrong model.
3. Does the admin own its outreach infrastructure, or is it licensing five platforms and marking them up? Because that answer determines whether they can afford to keep trying after touch eight.

The firms that will dominate mega-scale mass arb in 2027 are the ones locking in their admin economics now, before the claimant count forces the conversation. The math is not complicated. The discipline to run it before you commit is the hard part.