THE BASICS
A standard SMS is 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.
Each SMS is charged separately.
Example: If you have a message that is 2 SMS in length, if you send it to 500 contacts you will be charged for 1000 messages.
Due to the use of characters to join the messages after the first message, all parts are reduced to 153 characters.
| Standard SMS | Characters |
| 1 | 160 |
| 2 | 306 (153 x 2) |
| 3 | 459 (153 x 3) |
| 4 (Max) | 612 (153 x 4) |
Character counters are displayed where you create your message to help you calculate cost.
ESCAPE CHARACTERS
Escape characters are special characters within the GSM character set that consume slightly more data.
These characters will count for 2 in an SMS.
| Character type | Characters |
| Standard | 1 |
| Space | 1 |
| Line break | 1 |
Escape Character | ^ € { } [ ] ~ | 2 |
UNICODE
Characters such as emojis and non-latin alphabets like Chinese and Arabic use what is known as Unicode. Each character uses a larger amount of information, thus allowing a maxumum of 70 characters per text. Depending on how many Unicode characters are used, this will make a noticeable affect on the final character count. So you pay for each 70 instead of each 160 as with standard text.
Once a message has even a single Unicode character, the whole character count is reduced.
| Unicode SMS | Characters |
| 1 | 70 |
| 2 | 134 (67x2) |
| 3 | 201 (67x3) |
| 4 (Max) | 268 (67x4) |