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SMS Character Counter & Segment Calculator

See how your message is encoded, where its segments end and what it may cost. Your text stays in your browser.

Your SMS draft

Your draft and cost inputs stay in this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded or saved.

User-perceived characters: 0

Advanced settings

The alternate profile reserves a larger header. Twilio documents these smaller capacities for multipart toll-free SMS to the US and Canada; they are not universal.

Live estimate

0

segments

GSM-7

0 septets

160 of 160 septets available in the current segment

Common · 153 / 67

Estimate for the selected model. Your provider may handle the message differently.

Segment preview

Boundaries preserve the original text, including line endings. Send the complete original through your provider; do not send these previews separately.

Add a message to see its segments.

Review substitutions

Select each change to preview it. Punctuation replacements may alter typography or meaning. The original draft is never changed.

No curated substitutions are available. Languages, names and emoji are not transliterated.

Estimate campaign cost

Enter your own price to calculate an estimate.

Segments × recipients × price per segment. Round only the final total to the currency’s decimal places.

No exchange conversion, taxes or surcharges are included. Retries, failed delivery, destination, sender type, carrier and contract terms can change the bill.

SMS encoding capacities

EncodingSingle partMultipart, per part
GSM-7
septets
160153
Unicode
UTF-16 units
7067

In the common profile, 160 GSM septets fit one SMS; 161 require concatenation. Every part then reserves a UDH, leaving 153 septets or 67 UTF-16 units. GSM extension characters use two septets. CR and LF each consume one unit; CRLF consumes two. Line endings are never normalized.

Providers commonly call Unicode SMS UCS-2. Here it is modeled with UTF-16 units: 🙂 uses two, while a joined emoji may use many. The supporting character count measures graphemes, not transport units.

How to check an SMS

  1. Paste your message. Auto chooses GSM-7 when every symbol fits its alphabet; otherwise it uses Unicode.
  2. Read the segment estimate and inspect the characters that affect encoding. Open Advanced settings only if your gateway uses a different profile.
  3. Review the exact segment previews. Optionally select punctuation substitutions or enter your own price and recipient count.

Understanding SMS length

GSM-7 is a specific alphabet, not ASCII. It includes é and ñ but not every accented letter. Braces, brackets, the euro sign and several other extension characters need an escape and therefore use extra space.

Привет, 你好 and مرحبا naturally require Unicode in this model. This is normal language support, not a writing error. Even one smart quote in an otherwise GSM-compatible message changes the encoding of the entire draft.

A code point identifies a Unicode symbol; UTF-16 may represent it with one or two code units. A grapheme is a perceived character that can combine multiple code points. For example, e plus a combining acute accent and a family emoji each look like one character but occupy several units.

Long SMS messages use a User Data Header (UDH) to identify and reassemble parts. Header space reduces the payload of every part. Preview boundaries preserve combined characters and may leave space that a gateway would use differently.

Privacy and model limitations

Drafts, prices and recipient counts are held only in memory in this tab. Reloading clears them. Copying happens only when you choose a copy action. This tool neither sends SMS nor asks for a phone number.

National-language locking and single-shift tables, binary payloads, application ports, appended opt-out text, sender signatures, transliteration and carrier policies are outside this model. A provider may normalize, replace, append, reject or segment content differently. MMS and RCS are not calculated.

Use the price from your provider’s agreement for the destination and sender type. Currency selection changes display only. The final estimate is not a quote or a guarantee of the bill.

SMS counter questions

An emoji outside GSM-7 makes the whole message Unicode in Auto mode. Many emoji also require a surrogate pair, so one visible symbol can occupy more than one UTF-16 unit.

Sometimes a typographic quote or non-breaking space causes the switch. Review substitutions offers only explicit punctuation and space changes. It never transliterates languages, names or emoji, and it leaves your original untouched.

No. Normally you send the full original text through your provider. Its concatenation header lets the receiving phone reassemble the parts. The preview adds no numbering or separators to your message.

The selected header model, provider-added text, delivery retries, destination, sender type, taxes and contract terms may differ. The calculator uses only the segment estimate, recipients and price you enter.

No. The tool keeps your inputs in this tab’s memory and does not put them in the URL or upload them. Only an explicit copy action writes text to your clipboard.

Sources and verification

Sources checked: 2026-09-13

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