Encoding
UCS-2
Free tool
How many texts will your message actually cost?
One emoji or a curly “smart quote” can quietly turn a single text into three — tripling the bill for a big send. Paste your message to see its encoding, character count, how many SMS segments it becomes, and the estimated campaign cost.
Characters
100
SMS segments
2
Left in segment
34 / 67
Unicode (UCS-2) — capacity halved to 70 per segment. Triggered by: “–”, “—”. Replace smart quotes, em dashes and emoji with plain equivalents to drop back to cheap GSM-7.
Estimated total
300.00
Estimates only. Actual segmentation can vary slightly by provider, and your rate depends on country, carrier and volume. This tool runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Why do some characters cost more than others?
The short version: an SMS isn’t billed by the message — it’s billed by the segment, and which characters you use decides how many segments your message becomes.
An SMS segment is 140 bytes
The famous “160 characters” isn’t really about characters. A single SMS carries 140 bytes of payload. How many characters that buys depends on how each character is encoded — and there are two encodings in play.
GSM-7: the cheap path (160 characters)
Plain Latin text packs into 7 bits per character, so 160 fit in one segment. A few characters live in an “extension table” and secretly cost two slots each: [ ] { } \ | ^ ~ and €.
UCS-2: the expensive path (70 characters)
The moment your message contains one character GSM-7 can’t represent, the entire message switches to UCS-2 (16-bit Unicode) and a segment holds only 70 characters. Triggers are everywhere: emoji, curly “smart quotes”, em/en dashes (— –), the ellipsis …, and accented or non-Latin letters.
Long messages: the 153 / 67 tax
| Encoding | Single message | Each part of a multi-part message |
|---|---|---|
| GSM-7 | 160 characters | 153 characters |
| UCS-2 | 70 characters | 67 characters |
You’re billed per segment, per recipient. On a 50,000-person send, letting a smart quote flip your message from 1 GSM segment to 2 UCS-2 segments can double or triple the entire cost.
Keep messages in cheap GSM-7
- Turn off “smart quotes”/autocorrect, or draft in a plain-text editor.
- Use straight quotes, a hyphen instead of an em dash, and
...instead of…. - Skip emoji in SMS — save the rich stuff for WhatsApp, where length is free.
This is a big reason long or media-rich messages are often cheaper on WhatsApp, where there’s no per-segment meter. Different tools for different jobs.
SMS cost FAQ
Why was my single message charged as 2 or 3 texts?
Because it went over one segment. A message is billed per 160-character segment (GSM-7) or per 70-character segment (UCS-2). If your text is 170 characters, that is two segments. If it contained an emoji or a curly quote, it switched to UCS-2 at 70 characters per part — so even a fairly short message can span several segments.
What are GSM-7 and UCS-2?
They are the two ways text is encoded into an SMS. GSM-7 uses 7 bits per character and fits 160 characters per segment. UCS-2 uses 16 bits per character to represent any Unicode symbol but fits only 70 characters per segment. A message uses GSM-7 unless it contains a character GSM-7 cannot represent, in which case the whole message becomes UCS-2.
Do emojis really cost more?
Yes — a lot more. A single emoji forces the entire message into UCS-2, cutting per-segment capacity from 160 characters to 70, and many emoji take up two of those slots. One emoji can turn a 1-segment message into 3 segments.
Why does one special character change the whole message?
An SMS segment uses a single encoding for all of its characters, so the phone picks the encoding that can represent every character present. One out-of-range character (a smart quote, em dash, accented letter, or emoji) forces the expensive UCS-2 encoding on the entire text.
Are the prices in the calculator exact?
No. The calculator counts segments accurately, but the price per segment is whatever you enter — real rates vary by country, carrier, message type (A2P vs P2P), and volume. Multiply the segment count by your provider’s actual rate for a true figure.
Does WhatsApp charge per character too?
No. WhatsApp is not metered by 140-byte segments, so length, emoji, images and voice notes do not create per-character costs the way SMS does. For long or media-rich outreach that is a big advantage. (Note: WhatsApp’s official Business Platform restricts political/electoral use, while the open apps and click-to-chat links do not.)
The rest of the kit
SMS Democrat is a full toolkit for campaign texting — clean your copy with the message cleaner, add a compliant STOP/HELP footer, compare SMS vs WhatsApp, and time your send with the quiet-hours planner.