Calculating the cost for a SMS

Cost for an SMS is calculated based on the number of characters in the particular message text. As an example, if you send an SMS with “Where are you?” as the text, it has 14 characters. One SMS can be 160 characters in length. You can send longer messages using a process called concatenation. We use special characters to join the SMS together and deliver them as one message. Due to the use of characters to join the messages, there are inconsistencies in the length of the following SMS.

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Number of pages vs number of Characters

Upto 160 Characters = 1 page

160< Characters = 2 pages

306< Characters = 3 pages

459< Characters = 4 pages

As an example, if you send a message with 161 characters, you will be charged twice of your SMS price because you are sending two SMS pages in your message. Your recipient will receive the message as a single message, but technically if it has more than 160 characters you are sending multiple SMS connected together.

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spaces and line breaks

Each line break and space adds to your character count.

1 whitespace = 1 character

1 line break = 2 characters

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Shortcodes in messages

We count the text after any shortcodes are resolved. It’s safe to keep a safe margin by having an estimate of how long the shortcode’s final replacement text will take from your message.

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Unicode content

When SMS messages contain characters not found in the GSM-7 character set, we call it an Unicode SMS. An SMS allows up to 160 characters with the GSM-7 character set, which includes all latin characters (A-Z), digits (0-9), and a few special characters. Unicode can handle any known character but takes more SMS space than GSM’s 7-bit binary code. With that situation, SMS messages with unicode content are limited to 70 characters, and SMS content longer than this will be segmented.

Upto 70 Characters = 1 page

70< Characters = 2 pages

134< Characters = 3 pages

201< Characters = 4 pages