If you have a question about how we calculate the cost/price for a message you send through our service, this article may help you to resolve it. First of all, please note that every condition and network rule described below are according to the international standards and none of them were made by Notify.lk or the parent company.
Cost for an SMS is calculated based on the number of characters in the particular message text. As an example, if you send an SMS with “Where are you?” as the text, it has 14 characters. One SMS can be 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. Due to the use of characters to join the messages, there are inconsistencies in the length of the following SMS.
Number of pages vs number of Characters
Upto 160 Characters = 1 page
160< Characters = 2 pages
306< Characters = 3 pages
459< Characters = 4 pages
As an example, if you send a message with 161 characters, you will be charged twice of your SMS price because you are sending two SMS pages in your message. Your recipient will receive the message as a single message, but technically if it has more than 160 characters you are sending multiple SMS connected together.
Do spaces and line breaks add to my character count?
Yes, each line break and space adds to your character count.
1 whitespace = 1 character
1 line break = 2 characters
What if I use shortcodes in my messages?
We count the text after any shortcodes being resolved. It’s safe to keep a safe margin by having an estimate of how long the shortcode’s final replacement text will take from your message.
Hope you are now having a good understanding of how we calculate the cost for every single message you send through our API and our campaign dashboard. If you still have any doubts please contact our support team.
What about unicode content?
When SMS messages contain characters not found in the GSM-7 character set, we call it an Unicode SMS. An SMS allows up to 160 characters with the GSM-7 character set, which includes all latin characters (A-Z), digits (0-9), and a few special characters. Unicode can handle any known character but takes more SMS space than GSM’s 7-bit binary code. With that situation, SMS messages with unicode content are limited to 70 characters, and SMS content longer than this will be segmented.
Upto 70 Characters = 1 page
70< Characters = 2 pages
134< Characters = 3 pages
201< Characters = 4 pages