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What SMS costs

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If you use your own Twilio account, Gorilla Dash charges you nothing for messages — Twilio bills you directly. Everything below applies to Gorilla Dash managed numbers, which are metered to your account.

Two charges

  • Number rental — a monthly charge per number, whether you send anything or not.
  • Usage — per message segment for SMS, per message for MMS.

Your current rates are shown on the managed number card in Communications settings — number rental, transactional SMS, marketing SMS and MMS. Campaign messages are always billed at the marketing rate.

Segments are what you pay for

A text is billed per segment, not per message. A plain message fits 160 characters in one segment; longer messages are split into 153-character segments and you pay for each.

ONE EMOJI CAN TRIPLE THE COST OF A CAMPAIGN
A single character outside the basic set — an emoji, a curly quote pasted from a word processor, an accented letter — switches the whole message to a format that fits only 70 characters per segment. A 150-character message goes from one segment to three, on every recipient. Watch for smart quotes and dashes especially: they are invisible but they cost you.

The character counter is only a guide

The counter under the message box is a rough estimate. It does not account for emoji and accented characters, and it does not include the opt-out line that is added to every message automatically. Your real message is longer than the counter says, and the bill uses the real count.

Who pays

CampaignWho is billed
An organisation campaignThe organisation.
A campaign a tribe createdThat tribe.
A campaign pushed out to tribesYour choice — Organisation pays or Tribe pays.

The Who pays choice appears only when you are pushing a campaign out to tribes. It is independent of which number sent the message — an organisation-paid campaign is billed to the organisation even when it went out from a tribe's own number. A tribe cannot change who pays.

What is and is not billed

  • Billed — every message accepted for delivery, including ones the carrier later filters.
  • Billed — test sends from a campaign.
  • Not billed — recipients skipped because they could not receive an image.
  • Not billed — people excluded for having no number, being opted out, or being blocked.