Standard SMS messages are charged at 9 cents per SMS segment. If your firm has a specific arrangement, that rate is reflected on your account — contact support if you're unsure what applies to you. The important detail is that carriers bill per segment, not per message, so one long text can cost two or three times a short one. Nagaris shows you the segment count before you send.
A single SMS fits 160 characters when the whole message uses the standard SMS alphabet (plain letters, digits and common punctuation — known as GSM-7).
As soon as the message contains any character outside that alphabet — an emoji, a curly smart quote, or letters like é — the whole message switches encoding and a single SMS fits only 70 characters.
Longer messages are split into multiple segments and reassembled on the recipient's phone. Splitting has overhead, so each segment then fits 153 characters (standard alphabet) or 67 (with emoji or special characters).
A few characters — such as square brackets, curly braces, the caret, backslash, pipe, tilde and the euro sign — are technically part of the standard alphabet but cost two characters of budget each.
So a 320-character plain-text message is 3 segments (3 × 153 covers it), and even a short 80-character message becomes 2 segments if it includes a single emoji.
In the SMS reply box in the Inbox, a hint under the message reads like 2 SMS. 300/306 used — the number of segments, and how much of the current segment budget you've used. It turns amber once a message spills into multiple segments, so a silently doubled cost is visible before you hit send.
In the New Message sheet and the bulk-send composer, the preview panel shows a live chars · segments count that updates as you type or fill template variables.
In the SMS template editor, the same chars · segments counter appears under the message body so you can budget templates as you write them.
Stay under 160 characters where you can — the counters make this easy to check.
Watch out for pasted text: word processors often convert straight quotes to curly ones, which flips the whole message to the 70/67-character encoding.
With templates, remember placeholders expand — Hi {{recipient_firstname}} is short in the editor but longer for a client named Alexandra. The preview substitutes real values for the selected contact so the count you see is realistic.
Bulk SMS is priced the same way — each recipient's personalised message is billed on its own segment count. The bulk composer accepts up to 1,530 characters, but a message that long is 10 segments per recipient, so it pays to keep bulk texts tight.
