For the better part of three years, Postscript held an almost cultish grip on the Shopify SMS ecosystem. Operators running seven- and eight-figure DTC brands swore by it. Agency partners built entire retention practices around its segmentation tools. But sources close to the matter say that grip is loosening — and Attentive’s business development team is doing the loosening, one agency contract at a time.
Multiple agency leaders, speaking on background, describe an Attentive initiative that began quietly in Q1 2026 and has since accelerated: a tiered referral and co-marketing program that allegedly offers agencies between 15% and 22% recurring revenue share on net-new Attentive contracts — meaningfully higher than what Postscript’s partner program currently pays. One source familiar with the structure described it as “a direct answer to how Postscript built its moat,” adding that Attentive’s offer also includes dedicated agency success managers and co-branded case study budgets that Postscript has historically been slower to provide.
What Exactly Is Attentive Allegedly Offering Agency Partners?
According to two sources at separate agencies — one a top-20 Shopify Plus partner, the other a boutique retention shop with roughly 40 active SMS clients — the Attentive pitch is structured around what they’re calling an “Elite Agency Tier” that reportedly launched in late January 2026. The benefits, as described to us, include:
- Revenue share rates starting at 15% and scaling to 22% based on annual contract value placed through the agency
- A $10,000–$25,000 co-marketing fund per agency for co-branded webinars, case studies, and paid amplification
- Priority access to Attentive’s AI Journeys product roadmap previews — a tool the company has been aggressively pitching as a GPT-powered SMS flow builder capable of replacing manual segmentation
- Dedicated Slack channels with named Attentive CSMs, rather than a ticketed support queue
Postscript, for its part, offers its own partner program — but sources say the company has been slower to escalate commission tiers and has not matched the co-marketing spend. Requests for comment from Postscript’s communications team were not returned by press time.
Are Named Agency Leaders Actually Switching — or Just Taking the Meeting?
This is where it gets complicated. At least three agency operators have reportedly signed or are in final negotiations to shift their default SMS recommendation from Postscript to Attentive, according to sources familiar with those conversations. One is a well-known figure in the Shopify agency space: Nick Frampton, co-founder of Portland-based retention agency Nearline Digital, reportedly told his team in an April all-hands that Nearline would be “going Attentive-first” on new client engagements starting June 1. Frampton, reached by phone, declined to confirm the timeline but said, “We evaluate our vendor stack every six months. The economics of a partnership have to make sense for our clients and our business.”
“The economics of a partnership have to make sense for our clients and our business.” — Nick Frampton, co-founder, Nearline Digital
A second source, an agency principal who asked not to be named, was more blunt: “Postscript built its brand on being the scrappy indie option for Shopify brands. That was a great story in 2021. In 2026, when Attentive is offering me better economics, a better AI product, and a co-marketing budget to actually grow my practice, the scrappy story doesn’t pay my team’s salaries.”
Not everyone is convinced the defections are permanent or significant. Cody Engel, a retention strategist at Chicago-based agency Meridian Commerce Group, pushed back on the narrative. “We’re hearing the Attentive pitch too — everyone is — but Postscript’s deliverability and segmentation depth is still genuinely better for the complex use cases we run. A co-marketing check doesn’t fix a weaker product for high-volume brands doing $50M-plus in revenue.”
“A co-marketing check doesn’t fix a weaker product for high-volume brands doing $50M-plus in revenue.” — Cody Engel, retention strategist, Meridian Commerce Group
What Does This Mean for Postscript’s Core Merchant Base?
The agency channel matters enormously for SMS platforms because it’s how mid-market DTC brands — typically $5M to $50M in annual revenue — make vendor decisions. Enterprise brands ($100M-plus) are often sold to directly. The true SMB end ($500K and under) churns too fast to build a business around. The $5M–$50M band is the sweet spot, and agencies own those relationships.
Sources suggest Postscript still holds a majority position among Shopify brands in that range — but the lead is reportedly narrowing. One unconfirmed estimate from a source at a mid-market DTC investor said that among brands in their portfolio using SMS as a primary retention channel, Postscript’s share had declined from roughly 61% at the start of 2025 to closer to 48% as of April 2026, with the gap filled primarily by Attentive and — interestingly — Klaviyo’s SMS product, which has been gaining quiet traction as brands consolidate their email and SMS billing under a single vendor.
That consolidation trend may be the bigger strategic threat to Postscript than anything Attentive is doing at the agency level. As Klaviyo continues to push bundled pricing on its email-plus-SMS tier — sources suggest discounts of 20–35% versus paying for each product separately — brands that run heavy Klaviyo email programs have a compelling financial reason to pull SMS into the same platform, even if Postscript’s pure-SMS tooling is technically superior.
Is Attentive’s AI Journeys Product the Real Weapon Here?
Multiple sources flagged Attentive’s AI Journeys feature as the centerpiece of its current sales motion — not just with agencies, but in direct merchant pitches. The product, which Attentive has been iterating since a beta launch in mid-2025, allegedly uses large language model infrastructure to auto-generate and A/B test SMS flow variations based on historical send performance, product catalog data, and real-time behavioral signals.
The promise is significant: sources say Attentive has been showing brands beta results claiming 18–27% lift in revenue-per-message compared to manually built flows. Those figures are unverified and almost certainly represent best-case outcomes, but they’re landing with operators who are tired of spending agency hours hand-crafting segmentation logic.
Postscript has its own automation roadmap — its Automations product has been in development — but sources inside the company describe a team that is “resource-constrained” following an unconfirmed round of layoffs in Q4 2025 that reportedly reduced the engineering headcount by approximately 12%. Postscript did not respond to requests to confirm or deny the layoffs.
Who Stands to Win if the Agency Allegiances Shift?
Beyond the two-horse race, there’s a third-party narrative developing that bears watching. Klaviyo’s SMS growth is real and accelerating — the company disclosed in its Q1 2026 earnings commentary that SMS revenue grew 44% year-over-year, outpacing its email segment for the first time. If Klaviyo continues to bundle aggressively, both Postscript and Attentive face a scenario where the winner of the agency turf war is actually irrelevant, because the brands that matter most are consolidating onto a platform that neither of them owns.
There’s also a wildcard: TikTok Shop’s expanding creator messaging infrastructure has sparked speculation — unconfirmed, and admittedly early — that ByteDance may eventually build or acquire a first-party SMS/push tool to keep marketing communications inside its commerce ecosystem. Sources describe this as “cocktail-party speculation at this point,” but the broader pattern of social platforms internalizing what were once third-party functions is a real structural threat that all SMS vendors are watching.
For now, the immediate story is simpler and more operational: Attentive is spending real money to win agency relationships that Postscript built over years, and some of those agencies are listening. Whether that translates into durable market share shifts — or just a short-term negotiating posture that ultimately benefits the brands caught in the middle — is what the next two quarters will reveal.
Sources for this article include current and former employees at agencies and vendor organizations who requested anonymity due to non-disclosure agreements or ongoing business relationships. Postscript and Attentive did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
