The price per SMS depends on the recipient country. Countries outside the EU in particular sometimes have significantly higher prices.
You can find the current prices for all recipient countries on our pricing page and in the full country price list.
This price is applicable for SMS with GSM 03.38 encoding, also known as GSM-7. Each character is encoded with 7 bit, which allows you to send up to 160 characters per SMS.
Characters per SMS at a glance
| Encoding | Single SMS | Per part of a multi-part SMS |
|---|---|---|
| GSM 03.38 (GSM-7) | 160 characters | 153 characters |
| UCS-2 (Unicode) | 70 characters | 67 characters |
Our SMS character counter shows you character by character which encoding your text gets and how many parts it is split into.
Fewer characters for overlong/concatenated SMS
If you send an SMS with more than 160 characters, technically speaking several SMS are sent. Each of them contains an invisible header which the receiving device uses to reassemble the parts and display them as one SMS. This header takes up 6 bytes, i.e. the space of 7 characters - extra long SMS therefore have a maximum of 153 characters per SMS available.
An SMS with 161 to 306 characters is thus charged as 2 SMS, an SMS with 307 to 459 characters as 3 SMS.
Fewer characters for other encodings
If your SMS contains at least one character which is not part of the GSM 03.38 character set (e.g. Cyrillic characters or emojis), the entire SMS will be sent in UCS-2 format. Here 16 bit per character are required - therefore only 70 characters per SMS are available. For overlong UCS-2 messages with more than 70 characters, the header again takes up 6 bytes - in this case 67 characters per SMS are available for your text.
Most emojis take up 2 characters. Learn more under Send emojis.
The GSM 03.38 character set
These characters count as one character each in GSM 03.38:
| Group | Characters |
|---|---|
| Letters | A-Z, a-z |
| Digits | 0-9 |
| Accented letters | Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü ß Ñ ñ Å å Æ æ Ø ø Ç É é è ù ì ò à |
| Greek capital letters | Δ Φ Γ Λ Ω Π Ψ Σ Θ Ξ |
| Punctuation and symbols | ! " # ¤ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? ¡ ¿ @ £ $ ¥ § _ |
| Other | Space, line break |
Some special characters belong to the extension table and use two characters each for SMS with GSM 03.38 encoding:^ { } [ ] ~ | € \
Any other character causes the entire SMS to be sent in UCS-2. Common pitfalls are:
- typographic quotation marks such as “ ” ‘ ’ „ ‚, which Word or smartphones insert automatically - use
"and'instead - en dash – and ellipsis … - use
-and...instead - accents that are not in the table, e.g. á í ó ú ê ç as well as Turkish characters such as ı ş ğ
- emojis
Examples
Each SMS, or each part of a multi-part SMS, is charged at the price of your recipient country. If, for example, an SMS to your destination country costs €0.075, a message with two parts costs €0.15.
Привет, это тестовое SMS. Хороший день!
39 characters, UCS-2, 1 SMS is charged.
مرحبًا ، هذه رسالة تجريبية للاختبار تحتوي على العديد من الأحرف في المحتوى. اتمنى لك يوما جميلا!
95 characters, UCS-2, 2 SMS are charged.
Hello, this is a test SMS. Have a nice day!
43 characters, GSM 03.38, 1 SMS is charged.
Hello, this is a short test SMS with exactly 160 characters. The square brackets [ ] however take up 2 characters of space, hence this message is computed as 2.
160 characters (square brackets count double), GSM 03.38, 2 SMS are charged.
Other costs
If you send regular SMS you only pay the costs as they are listed above. There is no basic fee, unless you book an inbound number with us.
Your recipients do not pay a fee for receiving SMS. If they reply to your message, they pay the normal SMS costs according to their own cell phone contract.