SMS Billing
The SMS Billing section provides detailed information on how SMS message costs are calculated, depending on the number of characters and the type of characters used.
SMS Message Billing Rules
The length of a single SMS message, and therefore its cost, depends on the character encoding, which is automatically selected based on the content. The limits below comply with global GSM standards; however, in rare cases, minor differences may occur depending on the telecommunication operators.
Message with standard characters (GSM-7 encoding)
Your message is encoded in the GSM-7 standard if it contains exclusively characters from the basic Latin alphabet, digits, and the most common symbols.
Character limit: 160 per single SMS.
Concatenated messages (longer than 160 characters): Are charged as multiples of 153 characters.
SMS Billing for GSM-7 Characters
Number of Characters
Number of SMS Messages
1 - 160
1
161 - 306
2
307 - 459
3
460 - 612
4
613 - 765
5
766 - 918
6
919 - 1071
7
1072 - 1224
8
1225 - 1377
9
Note on extended characters: Some symbols, such as |, ^, €, ~, [, ], {, }, belong to the GSM-7 alphabet but are part of its extended table. This means each of them is counted as two characters, even though they do not change the encoding to Unicode.
Message with special characters (Unicode encoding)
Using even one special character that does not belong to the standard GSM-7 alphabet will change the encoding of the entire message to Unicode (UCS-2).
Examples of special characters:
Polish diacritical marks (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż)
Other diacritical marks from different languages (e.g., ä, ö, ü, ç)
Cyrillic
Emoji
When a message contains a special character:
Character limit: 70 per single SMS.
Concatenated messages (longer than 70 characters): Are charged as multiples of 67 characters.
SMS Billing for Unicode Characters
Number of Characters
Number of SMS Messages
1 - 70
1
71 - 134
2
135 - 201
3
202 - 268
4
269 - 335
5
336 - 402
6
403 - 469
7
470 - 536
8
537 - 603
9
Important Information
Always check the character counter in the campaign editor. Our system provides real-time information on how many parts your SMS will consist of.
If you use personalization (e.g., recipient names), the final character count of the SMS may vary for each recipient. The name "Ann" has 3 characters, but "Christopher" has 11. This difference can cause some messages in a sendout to be billed as 2 SMS parts. When planning your content, leave a margin for the longest possible data from your database to avoid unexpected costs.
Last updated