Free Tool

SMS Message Length Counter

Check how many SMS segments your message will use and estimate sending costs.

Type your message

Analysis

Characters

0

/ 160 per segment

Segments

0

Standard

Encoding

GSM-7 (160 chars/segment)

Estimated cost to send to 100 subscribers

$0.00

at $0.02 per segment

How to keep your SMS costs low.

Every SMS message is split into segments. A standard GSM message allows 160 characters per segment. If your message is 161 characters, it gets split into 2 segments — and you pay for both.

Unicode characters (emojis, curly quotes, accented letters) reduce the limit to just 70 characters per segment. A short message with one emoji can suddenly cost 2–3x as much.

Tips for keeping messages to 1 segment

  • +Keep messages under 160 characters when possible
  • +Avoid emojis if you're close to the character limit
  • +Use straight quotes instead of curly/smart quotes
  • +Use link shorteners for URLs
  • +Get to the point — your customers prefer short texts anyway
  • +Replace "&" with "and" only if it saves a Unicode issue

How SMS pricing works

Most SMS marketing platforms charge per message segment sent. If you have 200 subscribers and send a 2-segment message, that's 400 segments billed. Understanding segment counts is the key to controlling your SMS marketing budget.

For most vendor messages (“We're at the Saturday market today!”), you'll easily fit within 1 segment. Keep it short, direct, and actionable — your customers will appreciate it and your wallet will too.

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