Understanding SMS Segments

SMS messages are sent using blocks of characters, called segments -- and segments are how Daisychain calculates SMS usage for billing purposes.

A standard SMS message segment can have 160 "basic characters" -- which includes all standard letters and numbers. There are also "special characters" (like certain accented letters) might actually use up multiple characters in your segment. Emojis use a lot of characters, and change the number of characters allowed per segment in those messages to 70 instead of 160. Finally, if your message contains more than a single segment, subsequent segments have a limit of 153 characters. We know, it's a bit confusing.

Daisychain will automatically do a few things to try to help with SMS segments:

1. We will convert your outgoing multi-segment SMS message to an MMS message (which can contain 1600 plaintext characters) if it will save you money.

2. We will ensure that any multi-segment messages you send will be encoded in a way that most recipients with modern cell phones will receive them as a single message.​

3. We will automatically combine any incoming multi-segment messages that you might receive into a single message, for easy readability.

4. When you create an SMS campaign, the message preview will display the number of segments in your message.

If you want to calculate exactly how many segments a message will use (including lots of nerdy details), you can head on over to this SMS segment calculator.