You will be charged in credits when you send and receive text messages from and to your customers. You can read all about how credits are calculated in this article.

You will see a character counter in the lower left corner of the message creator when you send an SMS to a customer, preventing any unexpected credit transactions from your account.

If you notice the character count in the image above, it tells you the calculated SMS credits for a 207-character count.

When emoticons are added, the character count will be updated dynamically

Similarly, when an image is added, the conversion of SMS to MMS is reflected in real-time.

On clicking the “down-arrow,” we get the real-time calculation for Canada as well

Here’s how we calculate SMS credits and how it differs from country to country!

If you are in the U.S., we charge you 1 SMS credit for 160 characters. This will be the case if that SMS is sent with no emoticons.

But if you were to send a 70 charactered SMS with emoticons, then we will charge you 3 credits for that SMS.

160 characters of plain SMS with no emoticons - 1 SMS credit

70 characters of SMS with emoticons - 3 SMS credits

Now that we told you how we charge for SMS. Let’s look into how we charge for MMS for the U.S. users.

MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service. This usually consists of images, GIFs, and contact cards; you can send up to 1000 characters in one MMS.

Although you can send a much longer message using MMS, please note that the delivery of an MMS will be slower compared to an SMS.

For 1 MMS, you will be charged 3 credits in the U.S.A.

1 MMS - 3 Credits

Now that we looked into the specifics of how to calculate SMS credit usage for the U.S., let’s move to see how we charge our clients in Canada!

If you are running your SMS campaigns from Canada, we charge you 3 SMS credits for 160 characters. This is the case for messages that don’t use emoticons.

If you were to use emoticons in your text campaigns, then we charge you 3 SMS credits for 70 characters.

160 characters of plain SMS with no emoticons - 3 credits

70 characters of SMS with emoticons - 3 credits

And as for 1 MMS campaign, you will be charged 5 credits for 1 MMS in Canada

1 MMS - 5 Credits

Please note: You can send up to 1000 characters in one MMS, but the delivery will be comparatively slower.

Sample calculation for a campaign:

The credits per sms is a valuable metric to notice, incase the campaign size is 1000 and the credits per message is 3 and just by adjusting the length if we reduce the credit by 2 to total credit spent would be 2000 instead of 3000 which is a 50% save on credits used.