SMS length & pricing calculator

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 here, or simply write it in. This can be written in any language.
• In the From field, choose who the sender will be
• Finally, 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:

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.