Outbound SMS is priced by destination, but one message does not always equal one billable SMS. Longer messages can be split into multiple SMS segments, with each segment billed separately.
The number of characters per segment depends on the message encoding:
* GSM-7: up to 160 characters for a single SMS, or 153 characters per segment for longer messages
* Unicode: up to 70 characters for a single SMS, or 67 characters per segment for longer messages
Unicode encoding can apply to messages containing Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters, emoji and certain special characters.
A message that appears as one continuous text to the recipient may therefore consist of two, three or more billable SMS segments. For high-volume sending, check the final message length, encoding and segment count when estimating costs.
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