Messaging
SMS segment and cost estimator
Turn a message, a price per segment and a monthly volume into what you actually pay, charge and keep.
Free, no accountIn your browser
The same segment count the SMS length calculator uses. Nothing you type here is stored.
Your cost from the carrier or aggregator, per segment. Three or four decimal places are normal.
Leave blank to skip the markup and margin.
How many of this message you send in a month, to see the number that lands on an invoice.
Any three-letter code. It only labels the numbers below; nothing is converted.
Result
Nothing to price yet
Type or paste the message you send and a price per segment, and the cost is worked out as you type.
What this is
This sms cost calculator starts from the measured segment count - the same count a carrier actually bills on, not a guess at character length - then multiplies it by whatever price per segment you pay or charge, for one message and for a month of them.
A text message is billed by the segment, not by the character or the word, and how much a segment holds depends on its encoding: a GSM-7 message holds 160 characters in one segment and 153 in each of several, while a Unicode message - forced by a single character outside the GSM-7 alphabet - holds only 70 and then 67. This tool reuses the same segment count the SMS length calculator computes, then turns it into money.
A reseller rarely cares what one message costs on its own; the number that lands on an invoice is the monthly volume times that price, and the gap between what is paid per segment (wholesale) and what is charged per segment (resale) is the margin the whole business runs on.
How to read the result
The headline is the segment count and what this one message costs at the wholesale price entered. The findings say whether the message fits in one segment or spills into a second one that doubles what is paid for it, and name the monthly cost at the volume entered.
When a resale price is also given, a markup and a margin finding appears, dividing the same profit by cost for markup and by price for margin. A resale price set below the wholesale one is flagged rather than hidden, because it is the one mistake in this maths that actually loses money on every message sent.
Segment pricing is the first of three checks that decide whether an SMS arrives at all; see sending an SMS that arrives for the sender-name and A2P throughput checks that come after it.
Common mistakes
What goes wrong most often, and how to tell.
- Pricing a message by character, not by segmentA text message is billed per segment, not per character or per word, and a 161-character GSM-7 message or a 71-character Unicode one is billed as two segments, not one. A price per segment applied to the wrong count understates the real cost by a predictable amount.
- Letting a curly apostrophe double a bill without noticingOne character outside GSM-7 - a curly apostrophe pasted from a document, an emoji, an accented letter - switches the message to Unicode, where a segment holds only 70 characters instead of 160. A message that fit in one segment can silently become two and double what is paid for it.
- Treating markup and margin as the same percentageA reseller pricing from a wholesale cost and a resale price has both a markup, which is profit over cost, and a margin, which is profit over price, and the two differ more as the markup grows. Stating only one hides how much of the resale price is actually profit.
Questions
What people ask about this tool.
- It depends entirely on the price per segment you are charged and how many segments the message is billed as, which this calculator works out from the actual text rather than assuming a price; there is no single fixed answer because every carrier and aggregator sets its own rate.
- A character outside the GSM-7 alphabet - most often a curly apostrophe or an emoji - forces the whole message into Unicode, where a segment holds only 70 characters instead of 160, so a message that used to fit in one segment needs two and is billed for both.
- Wholesale cost is what you pay per segment to send the message; margin is the share of what you charge the customer that is left over as profit once that cost is paid, and the two move apart fast as the markup on a thin wholesale price grows.
- A fraction of a cent of difference in the price per segment is invisible on one message but turns into real money once it is multiplied by a real sending volume, which is the number that actually lands on an invoice at the end of the month.
Use it from the API
The same check, as one request.