SMS length & pricing calculator

Count the characters in your text message, estimate the sending costs, and preview your SMS campaign on various phones

Message

Characters: 42/918

Parts: 1/6

Choose a template

Cost to send SMS

$ 0.015

This is the total cost for all parts of the message.

How many contacts do you plan to send your campaign to?

Total campaign cost

$0.015

Did you know you can get free SMS each month with your paid Omnisend plan?

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Preview & text analysis

Copy and paste your text, or write it here

Copy and paste your text, or write it here

Copy and paste your text, or write it here

Regular GSM (7-bit) character

Special symbol in GSM counted as 2 characters

Non-GSM character, encoded using Unicode

How to use the SMS length calculator

Omnisend’s text message length calculator is another convenient tool from our Marketer’s Toolbox. This calculator allows you to see the number of characters that you’ll be sending in your text messages, the type of characters, and the price for sending the SMS campaign.

You can copy and paste your prepared message in the "Message" input field, or simply write it in. This can be written in any language.
Choose the destination country for where the SMS message will be sent so you can calculate the cost of the campaign.
Preview the message on different types of phones, including the iPhone, an Android phone, and a feature phone.

Why you should use the SMS length calculator tool

Using our text message tool has some pretty great benefits you’ll need to make sure your SMS campaigns succeed. You can:

See the true character length of your text message

Unfortunately, not all characters were created equal. For example, while the standard text message length is 160 characters, using the Unicode charset (character set) will bring this limit down to just 70 characters. Even more, some characters from the GSM 03.38 charset will require the inclusion of hidden “escape characters” to be used with “extended characters” (like { or ~). Escape characters will require two characters to encode, so even if you use just 160 GSM characters, your message may still end up being split into two if it contains these characters.

Calculate the cost for your SMS campaigns

Our simple-to-use calculator will make it easy for you to estimate your text message costs. You can choose the destination country for where you will send your SMS campaigns. You can also choose how many messages you’ll be sending—which is, essentially, how many subscribers you’ll be sending your SMS campaign to. That way, you can determine your price beforehand to better plan your campaigns. All pricing is based on Omnisend’s SMS rates (some Omnisend plans offer free SMS credits).

Preview your text message on different mobile devices

With our SMS character count tool, you can also see how your text message will be displayed on different devices. This includes an iPhone (for Apple users), a Samsung phone (for Android users) and a feature phone.

Get in-depth with your text message

Our in-depth analysis of your text message will help you to understand the true details of your SMS campaigns. This is especially important if you are using special characters or different languages besides English.

In our in-depth text analysis, you’ll see three views: light grey color for regular characters in the GSM charset, yeallow color for symbols in the GSM charset that will be counted as two characters, and red color for non-GSM characters that will need to be encoded with Unicode.

This analysis is critical if you want to ensure that your text messages aren’t split or contain strange characters when your subscribers receive them. If you see any issues in the text message analysis, you can quickly change it to give your SMS campaigns the best chance of success.

What is the GSM charset?

The GSM charset (or specifically, the GSM 03.38 charset) is the standard character set that is used in text messaging for GSM-based phones. This character set packages the most commonly used letters and symbols into 7 bits each to be used on GSM networks. This includes the uppercase and lowercase English alphabet, special symbols, numbers and certain symbols from the Greek alphabet.

GSM-encoded messages can carry up to 160 characters at a time. However, as we mentioned above, some extended characters like '{' and ']' require the use of escape characters or escape codes, which leads to these characters being encoded using two characters.

When text cannot be encoded in GSM, it will be encoded in Unicode, which supports a much larger range of languages and symbols. However, Unicode encoding takes up more space than GSM, allowing only 70 characters instead of GSM’s 160 characters.

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