Paste your message and see exactly what carriers will do with it: character count, number of billed segments, and whether a stray emoji or diacritic just cut your capacity from 160 to 70 characters. Works as you type, nothing is sent anywhere.
Next, get the price for those segments with the SMS cost calculator.
| Encoding | Single SMS | Per segment when split | Triggered by |
|---|---|---|---|
| GSM-7 (standard) | 160 characters | 153 characters | Plain Latin letters, digits, common punctuation |
| Unicode (UCS-2) | 70 characters | 67 characters | Any single emoji, diacritic (ș, ă, ü…), curly quote or symbol outside GSM-7 |
Some GSM-7 characters (€ [ ] { } ^ ~ \ |) are “extended” and count as two. The counter above handles this, including the switch to 153/67 when a message splits.
160 characters with the standard GSM-7 alphabet. One character outside it (an emoji, ș, ă, or a curly quote pasted from Word) switches the whole message to Unicode (UCS-2), where one SMS holds only 70 characters.
The message splits into segments that the phone reassembles. A few bytes go to the reassembly header, so split GSM-7 messages carry 153 characters per segment and Unicode messages carry 67. Every segment is billed as one SMS.
A single character outside the GSM-7 alphabet forces the whole message into Unicode, dropping per-segment capacity from 160 to 70 characters. A 300-character message goes from 2 segments to 5, more than double the cost. If the emoji sells, keep it, but make that a deliberate choice.
RCSZilla shows the same live segment count while you compose. Send through your own Android phone for free, or via cloud from €0.02 per SMS.
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