Calculating SMS and MMS Costs: A Step-by-Step Guide

What Determines SMS Costs?

There are many factors impacting SMS Costs. Such as the per-segment SMS cost, direction (inbound or outbound), attaching an image (MMS), emojis, carrier fees, and more. We encourage you to explore all of our SMS Pricing here. In addition, we outlined most of the factors impacting SMS Costs below in the section "Understanding the Factors Impacting SMS Costs." We recommend reviewing this article and the SMS Pricing in full to better understand SMS costs and pricing.

Steps to Estimate Outbound SMS Costs

An SMS is made up of segments, with each segment containing 160 characters. If your message exceeds this limit, it will be divided into multiple segments, increasing your overall cost.

In cases where an internal error occurs within Luubu Phone before the message is handed off to the phone provider, you will not be charged. However, once a delivery attempt has been made, charges apply regardless of whether the message is successfully delivered. This includes SMS sent from toll-free numbers, A2P numbers, and those that cannot be delivered due to country restrictions or other limitations. We encourage users to carefully review their messages before sending, as refunds will not be issued for undelivered SMS.

What is an SMS Segment?

An SMS segment is a unit of measurement used to calculate SMS charges. Each segment consists of 160 characters if GSM-7 encoding is used. If the message exceeds this limit, it will be broken into multiple segments, increasing the cost.

Example:

A message with 160 characters = 1 segment.

A message with 161 characters = 2 segments.

The more segments your message contains, the higher the cost.

It is important to know all of the SMS Pricing, however, it is reasonable to assume your highest SMS costs will be related to sending outbound SMS. For this reason, we will walk you step by step through the process of estimating the cost of an outbound SMS.

The Steps to Estimating Outbound SMS Costs

There are four steps to estimating the cost of an outbound SMS...

Find the Number of Segments in your Text

Lookup Per-Segment Cost

Lookup Carrier Fees (≈$0.005)

Calculate

As we go to calculate the cost of an SMS, we use our Outbound SMS Cost Equation to estimate the cost of our SMS:

Outbound SMS Cost Equation:Estimated Cost of Outbound SMS =[(Number of Segments)(Per-Segment Cost)]+[(Number of Segments)(Carrier Fees)]

Step 1: Find the Number of Segments in your Text

After writing the message you want to send, we copy the text message. Then open the Messaging Segment Calculator and paste the copied text message into the Messaging Segment Calculator. See the "Number of Segments" to locate the number of segments. Keep this available as we continue.

Outbound SMS Cost Equation:Estimated Cost of Outbound SMS=[(Number of Segments)(Per-Segment Cost)] [(Number of Segments)(Carrier Fees)]Example:Estimated Cost of Outbound SMS=[(5)(Per-Segment Cost)] [(5)(Carrier Fees)]

Step 2: Lookup Per-Segment Cost

Open up the SMS Pricing page. Select the country you are sending outbound messages in.

Then scroll down to "SMS/MMS Pricing." Locate your "Per-Segment Costs". In our example, we are sending an outbound SMS for long codes. So we choose $0.0079 for this example.

Outbound SMS Cost Equation:Estimated Cost of Outbound SMS=[(Number of Segments)(Per-Segment Cost)] [(Number of Segments)(Carrier Fees)]Example:Estimated Cost of Outbound SMS=[(5)($0.0079)] [(5)(Carrier Fees)]

Step 3: Lookup Carrier Fees (≈$0.005)

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