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Message Credits and Character Limitations for SMS and MMS

Message credits length of messages special characters

Margarite Marquez avatar
Written by Margarite Marquez
Updated over a week ago

Message credits are deducted based on the length and type of message sent, as outlined below:

Replacement for this article: How do you count the messages I send?

SMS (Short Message Service):

  • A standard SMS message contains up to 160 characters, including spaces. Messages within this limit are counted as one credit. ( 1 credit = 1 message to 1 contact)

    Example of Short SMS Message:

Long SMS

If your message exceeds 160 characters, it will be split into multiple segments, with each segment considered a separate message. For example, a 300-character message would count as two messages.

Example of a Long SMS:

Special Characters

  • Messages containing special characters(such as emojis, or non-Latin characters) are encoded in Unicode, which limits the character count to 70 characters per segment.

    Unicode messages may, therefore, require multiple segments

Example of Special Characters in a Campaign

Click here to use our Character Counting Tool.

MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service):

  • MMS messages, which include multimedia content such as images, videos, or audio files, allow up to 1200 characters of text; however, the total character capacity is determined by the overall size of the message, including the multimedia content.

Example of MMS Message

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