Each time you send or receive an SMS message, there is an associated credit cost. Your company will have a monthly allowance of SMS credits. See below for a full breakdown of the credit costs associated with sending and receiving SMS messages from different country codes. 

For an overview of SMS in Beamery, check out this article. For more information on the countries for which Beamery can provision virtual phone numbers, check out this article.

Table of Contents

Sending Messages
Receiving Messages
Tracking your Credits

Sending Messages

When you send an SMS message, there is a credit cost per message segment. What’s considered a message segment varies depending on the character type. For example, messages written in Latin characters have a 160 character segment, while a message written in Japanese characters has a 70 character segment.  Similarly, if you use Latin characters in your  message, then the overall character limit for an SMS is 1600 characters. The overall character limit also varies depending on character type. This is easy to manage with the character counter seen in the SMS window. When typing your message, you will see your total character count, and you will see that count change if you use non-Latin characters. 

If your Beamery phone number is from the United States or Canada, sending one message segment to a contact with a phone number in the United States or Canada will cost 1 credit, and sending a message segment to a number from any other country will cost 3 credits. 

See the below table for credit costs for sending a message segment from other countries:

Receiving Messages

As with sending messages, when you receive an SMS message, there is an associated cost per message segment. The credit cost of receiving a message segment depends on both the country code from which your Beamery phone number sends messages, and the country code of the phone number where the message is received.

If your Beamery phone number is from the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland or Sweden, to determine how many credits you’ll be charged when receiving a message, see the column labelled Group 1 in the table below. 

If your Beamery phone number is from Portugal or Hong Kong, to determine how many credits you’ll be charged when receiving a message, see the column labelled Group 2 in the table below. 

Tracking Your Credits

When your company reaches the last 10% of your message allowance, you will see the notification below when you send an SMS message. For further information about the number of credits you have left, please reach out to your administrator or Beamery point of contact.

Once your company has reached the limit of it’s messaging allowance, you will see this message when attempting to send an SMS message, and your message will not be sent. 

In Summary… 

Use this article as a reference to understand the cost in credits of sending SMS messages using Beamery.

Additional Resources: 

An Overview of SMS Messaging in Beamery
SMS Virtual Phone Numbers: Which Countries are Supported?