SMS Basics
What SMS costs
Number rental, per-segment pricing, how a long message becomes three, and who gets the bill.
Last updated September 2, 2026
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.
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
| Campaign | Who is billed |
|---|---|
| An organisation campaign | The organisation. |
| A campaign a tribe created | That tribe. |
| A campaign pushed out to tribes | Your 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.