SMS Billing

The cost of sending an SMS depends on its length, which is determined by the type of characters used in the content. The system automatically selects the appropriate encoding (GSM-7 or Unicode), which directly affects the character limit of a single message. The rules below are consistent with global standards and market practices.

Message without special characters (GSM-7 standard)

If your message consists exclusively of standard Latin alphabet characters, digits, and basic symbols, it is encoded in the efficient GSM-7 standard.

• Single SMS: up to 160 characters

• Longer (concatenated) messages: each subsequent segment is 153 characters

Character Count	Billed as
1–160 characters	1 SMS
161–306 characters	2 SMS
307–459 characters	3 SMS
460–612 characters	4 SMS
613–765 characters	5 SMS
766–918 characters	6 SMS
919–1071 characters	7 SMS
1072–1224 characters	8 SMS
1225–1377 characters	9 SMS

Important: The GSM-7 alphabet has an extended character set (e.g., |, ^, €, ~, [, ], {, }), which are counted twice. This means that each of them takes up the space of two standard characters, without changing the encoding to Unicode.

Message with special characters (Unicode standard)

To guarantee correct display on all phones, we consider the following, among others, as special characters:

• All diacritical marks (e.g., ą, ś, ü, ç)

• Pictograms and emoji

• Non-Latin alphabets (e.g., Cyrillic)

In this case, the character limits are significantly reduced:

• Single SMS: up to 70 characters

• Longer (concatenated) messages: each subsequent segment is 67 characters

Character Count	Billed as
1–70 characters	1 SMS
71–134 characters	2 SMS
135–201 characters	3 SMS
202–268 characters	4 SMS
269–335 characters	5 SMS
336–402 characters	6 SMS
403–469 characters	7 SMS
470–536 characters	8 SMS
537–603 characters	9 SMS

Recommendation: Before sending, always verify in our web app how the system has counted the characters in your message. The character counter shows in real-time how many parts the SMS will consist of, which helps to avoid unexpected costs.

Remember about personalization: If you use personalization tags (e.g., ##name##), the final length of the message will depend on the length of the recipient's data (e.g., the name "Ian" vs. "Katherine"). This may cause the message for some of your base to be billed as 1 SMS, and for others as 2 SMSs. To avoid higher costs, leave a safe margin of characters in your content, taking into account the longest possible name or other data in your database.