When you’re sending and receiving text messages to/from your candidates, you will be charged in credits. In this article, you can learn all about how credits are calculated.

When you send an SMS to a candidate, you will see a credit calculator in the bottom left of the message box stating how many credits the SMS will be. This way there will be no surprises in the credit transactions from your account. On the right-hand side, you will also see the number of characters used for this message.

Now, let’s look into the details of how characters and credit are counted.

You’re charged 1 credit both for an incoming and an outgoing SMS. How one SMS is calculated depends on the number/type of characters, and other factors such as what country you text, and how many the SMS is sent to. Let’s look into some specifics.

All characters added to your text message use one of the following encodings: 7-bit or Unicode. When using 7-bit, you are allowed to use 160 characters in one SMS, and when using Unicode this is limited to 70 characters.

7-bit encoding is the most commonly used encoding for messages. The set includes all the English lowercase letters (a-z), uppercase letters (A-Z), and numbers from 0 to 9, as well as the following characters:

In addition, you can use the following characters that will be used for the cost of two characters (since they are prepending by the escape character ESC):

The message length for 7-bit encoding is up to 160 characters.

The Unicode encoding supports a much bigger range of characters/languages. Whenever you add a character not listed in the 7-bit alphabet, the Unicode encoding is automatically used. Since these characters take up a lot more space, the message length is reduced to 70 characters per SMS (credit).

When your message exceeds the character limit of 160 characters (7-bit encoding) or 70 characters (UCS-2 encoding), the message is split up into multiple SMS. When this happens, the allowed characters per SMS are a bit shortened (this is to make sure the multipart SMS is delivered in a good way to the receiver). The length of the 7-bit message is shortened to 153 characters, and the Unicode message is reduced to 67 characters.

One entire text message can contain up to 1600 characters in total and will be charged several credits.

When sending bulk messages to candidates, you must include the option to opt out of any further messages. This is therefore automatically added to the end of the first bulk message sent to the specific candidate. These characters are included in the total amount of characters per SMS.

You can learn more about the opt-out message functionality here.

By default, the messages will be sent from your generated number found under Settings → Company → SMS.
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When sending SMS to candidates from an international number, some countries will replace the number with a generic sender ID owned by Twilio. In those cases, we add the generated SMS number shown in your SMS settings so that recipients know where to send their reply. This extra line is included in the number of characters.

Note that this only happens when the candidate has a number in a different country than the SMS number.