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SMS Character Counter & Segment Calculator

Live character count, GSM-7 vs Unicode detection, and per-segment cost math, using the same segment engine VoiceDrop runs in production. Find the one character that's doubling your bill.

0

Characters

N/A

Encoding

0

Segments

160

Left in segment

of 160/segment

What does this cost at scale?

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$0 / send

Most US providers bill per segment, per recipient. Trimming one segment off a 1,000-contact blast saves $10.00 every send.

How SMS length actually works

Every text message travels in one of two encodings. GSM-7, the original 1980s SMS alphabet, packs 160 characters into one segment. Unicode (UCS-2) handles everything else (emoji, non-Latin scripts, smart punctuation) but fits only 70 characters per segment. There is no in-between: a single non-GSM character flips the entire message to Unicode.

EncodingSingle messagePer segment when split
GSM-7160 characters153 characters
Unicode (UCS-2)70 characters67 characters

The usual culprits aren't emoji you added on purpose. They're characters pasted in from Word, Google Docs, or ChatGPT: curly quotes (“ ” ’), em dashes, ellipses (…), and invisible non-breaking spaces. They look identical to their plain cousins and cost you 90 characters of capacity.

Why segments decide your campaign budget

Providers bill per segment, per recipient. At a typical $0.01 per segment, the same announcement to 25,000 contacts costs $250 as one tight GSM-7 segment, or $750 if smart quotes pushed it to three Unicode segments. Multi-segment messages also see more carrier filtering, so the long version can cost triple and deliver worse. Before you send, run the copy through the SMS spam checker too. Length is one of the risk signals it scores.

FAQ

SMS length questions, answered

A single SMS carries 160 characters in the standard GSM-7 alphabet, or 70 characters when any character forces Unicode (UCS-2) encoding. Longer messages are split into concatenated segments of 153 GSM-7 or 67 Unicode characters each: the missing characters are used by the header that tells the phone how to stitch the parts back together.
One character outside the GSM-7 alphabet (an emoji, a smart quote pasted from a Word doc, an em dash, even an invisible non-breaking space) switches the entire message to Unicode encoding, cutting capacity from 160 to 70. The tool above lists the exact offending characters and can swap the fixable ones automatically.
Carriers and SMS providers bill per segment, per recipient, not per message. A 2-segment text to 10,000 contacts is 20,000 billed segments. That's why one stray emoji can quietly double a campaign's cost.
An emoji doesn't just count for more: it changes the encoding of the whole message to Unicode, dropping every segment's capacity from 160/153 characters to 70/67. Some emoji are also made of multiple code units, so a single 👍🏽 can consume 4 of your 70 characters.
The basic Latin alphabet, digits, common punctuation, and a set of accented European letters and Greek capitals. Nine characters (| ^ € { } [ ] \ and ~) are 'extended' GSM-7: they're allowed, but each one counts as two characters because it's sent with an escape code.
Almost never. Modern phones reassemble concatenated segments into one bubble. The split only shows up on your bill, in rare cases on very old handsets, and in slightly higher odds of carrier filtering for long messages.

Counting characters is the easy part.

VoiceDrop sends two-way SMS at wholesale rates alongside ringless voicemails in your own AI voice, with segment-aware previews built into the composer, so campaigns never surprise you on cost.

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