Text Messaging Fees

As of June 2023 Intulse has decided to pause passing these fees through to our clients and instead we are paying them on their behalf. This may change in the future but for the indefinite future our clients will not be paying these fees.

Beginning June 1, 2022 Intulse will be passing on the per-message surcharge mobile carriers bill to Intulse for 10DLC.

Intulse does not add any charges for incoming or non-bulk outgoing messages sent through our app, that feature is included in your per extension charges. For messages sent using our API or integrations that use our API we charge $0.007 per message segment for SMS messages and $0.019 per message segment for MMS messages.

Intulse does charge fees related to 10DLC brands and campaigns. What is 10DLC? Well, that's a big question with a long answer but the short version is that 10DLC is a massive, industry wide, effort to reduce text message spam. For up-to-date 10DLC fees please log into the Intulse Account Center. For more information see our article on 10DLC Business Messaging.

You will see these surcharges invoiced once a month for all applicable text messages sent/received in the previous month.

Understanding text message segments

Text message character segments are the individual units text messages are broken into for delivery, with a standard SMS segment holding up to 160 characters using the GSM-7 encoding. When a message exceeds this limit, it's split into multiple segments, and characters like emojis or accented letters (which use UCS-2 encoding) reduce the number of characters per segment to about 70, or 67 for multi-segment messages.

Character limits per segment

• Standard (GSM-7): A single segment can contain up to 160 characters.
• Multi-segment (GSM-7): For messages longer than 160 characters, each subsequent segment can hold up to 153 characters, as 7 characters are reserved for reassembly.
• Standard (UCS-2): A single segment can contain up to 70 characters when using a different encoding for special characters or emojis.
• Multi-segment (UCS-2): For messages longer than 70 characters, each subsequent segment can hold up to 67 characters, as 3 characters are reserved for metadata.

How segments affect messages

• Length: A message of 161 characters will be broken into two segments: one with 153 characters and a second with 8 characters.
• Encoding: Using emojis or other special characters will decrease the number of characters that can fit in a segment, potentially requiring more segments for the same message length.
• Delivery: Most modern phones automatically reassemble the segments so the message appears as a single, continuous text to the recipient.
• Cost: When a message is billable we charge a fee for each segment based on if the message was a regular text message (SMS) or included media (MMS)