SMS & MMS Pricing

Text messages are billed per segment, not per message — so a long message can cost more than one credit even though you only hit send once.

How segments are counted

• Plain text (standard characters, no emoji): 160 characters per segment.
• Text with emoji or certain special characters: the message switches to Unicode encoding, which drops the limit to 70 characters per segment.

Go over the limit and your message splits into multiple segments, each billed separately. Copy-pasting text from other apps can sometimes carry invisible formatting characters that push a message into Unicode encoding without you realizing it — if a message you expected to be one segment is costing more, that's worth checking.

SMS vs. MMS

MMS (any message with an image, GIF, or video attached) costs more per message than SMS, and is priced differently — generally per message rather than per character segment. Sending media occasionally for something worth the extra cost (an appointment confirmation with a map, a product photo) is reasonable; sending media on every routine text adds up fast.

What affects your cost

• Segment count — longer messages, and any use of emoji, increase this.
• Destination country — international rates differ from domestic.
• Direction — inbound and outbound may be priced slightly differently.
• Media attachments — MMS vs. plain SMS.

Check Settings > Phone System > Billing for your account's current per-segment and MMS rates, and use Messaging Analytics to see actual segment and message counts for recent sends.