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This article will provide insight into how Emotive calculates cost for messages, and drill down on Broadcast, Flow, and incoming message costs. You’ll also learn what a message segment is, and how it is calculated.

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Cost Metrics

The following shows the different metrics that contribute to calculating your messaging cost.
SMS Segment Count and SMS Fee + MMS Segment Count and MMS Fee.
Based on the average fees across all messages Emotive sends. Your actual carrier fee may be higher or lower.
Message Cost + Estimated Carrier Fees

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Segments

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What is a message segment?

Phone carriers use message segments to batch and charge for sending text messages to your customers. Segments are typically 160 characters or 70 characters, depending on the type of characters you use (see below for specifics).
If you are sending a message that exceeds these limits, carriers will charge for additional segments.

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SMS Segments

An SMS (short message service) segment generally consists of 160 basic text characters. It’s common practice to include Emoji’s to deliver a more engaging messaging with your customers. Note that this will reduce your segment count to 70 characters (see below for details). You can see how many characters you have used, how many characters are in each segment, and the total number of segments your message will use in the counter below the message field in Broadcasts.

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MMS Segments

An MMS (multimedia messaging service) segment is any media message, such as an image or a gif. One image or gif equals one MMS segment.
Several factors, determined by the carrier, will cause the character limit of your SMS segment to change. These include:
  1. Using emojis and certain characters outside the basic text character set (known as GSM-7,full list of characters here ) will cause your segment character limit to change to 70.
  2. Using more than one segment will decrease the length of each of your segments. For messages with basic text only, it will be decreased by 7 characters. For messages with emojis, it will be decreased by 3 characters.
  3. Additionally, emojis and a few other basic and non-basic text characters count as more than 1 character. The smiley emoji and “[”, for example, are both 2 characters.
When using a variable such as <name> where the name length changes depending on the customer, the character count of the message will change accordingly. Because of this, some messages in the same broadcasts may consist of more segments than others, if a longer name pushes the message into a new segment.
Keep in mind that the number of segments used multiplied by the number of customers messaged to will not give you a full estimate of the total cost of the broadcast. Customers may respond to your message as well which will be attributed to your broadcast costs.
It is possible that a special character has been added to your broadcast. You can run your content through this checker, https://twiliodeved.github.io/message-segment-calculator/, which will highlight any non-standard characters.The most common example of this is the “single quote”, which looks almost exactly like an apostrophe. In fact if you’re copying your content from a google document, it is likely that it was used instead of an apostrophe. 
Google documents use a feature called “Smart Quotes” which replaces normal apostrophes with this “single quote” character. You can use this walkthrough to disable it. 

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Broadcast Messages

Here is a breakdown of what you will see with your Broadcasts’ itemized billing.
  • Broadcast Name
  • Message Count
    • Message counts are based on SMS Segments + MMS Segments sent.
  • SMS Segments
    • Total count of SMS segments sent (varies per message calculations here).
  • MMS Segments
    • Total count of MMS Segments sent.

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Flow Messages

Here is a breakdown of what you will see with your Flows’ itemized billing.
  • Experience Name
  • Message Count
    • Messages are based on SMS Segments + MMS Segments sent.
  • SMS Segments
    • Total count of SMS segment sent (varies per message calculations here).
  • MMS Segments
    • Total count of MMS Segments sent.

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Incoming / Other Messages

Here is a breakdown of what you will see with your Incoming and other messages’ itemized billing.
  • Message Count
    • Messages are based on SMS Segments and MMS Segments sent.
  • SMS Segments
    • Total count of SMS segments sent (varies per message calculations here).
  • MMS Segments
    • Total count of MMS Segments sent.
For more information on Itemized Billing, please visit this article.