How SMS is charged: segments, and why emoji cost you

SMS is not billed per message but per segment, which is how mobile carriers charge everyone. Understanding segments keeps your credit spend predictable.

What a segment is

A text of up to 160 standard GSM-7 units is one segment and costs one credit. Some symbols, including braces, square brackets and the euro sign, count as two units. A longer text is split into chunks of 153 units, each costing a credit, so a 200-unit message costs two credits and a 320-unit one costs three. Keep templates short and most messages stay at one credit each.

Why emoji are the enemy

The 160-character allowance only applies to the standard SMS alphabet. A single emoji forces the entire message into a different encoding where segments shrink to just 70 characters, which can double or triple the cost of an otherwise short text.

AesthetiClinic protects you from this automatically: every outgoing text is normalised to the standard alphabet before sending. Smart quotes, long dashes and similar typographic characters are converted to plain equivalents, and anything that cannot be converted, such as emoji, is removed. So a pasted-in emoji will not blow up your bill, but it will simply not appear in the text; leave them out of SMS templates.

Links are shortened too

Booking links in SMS templates are automatically shortened (the https:// prefix is dropped and a compact redirect path is used) to save characters; links pasted into a manual reply are sent as typed.

Where you see the cost

The credit ledger on Settings > Messaging shows the 15 most recent credit changes; a multi-segment text is noted with its segment count. The cost includes the final wording, links and any clinic-name or contact instructions added to the text. A skipped send uses no credit, and an immediate provider refusal is refunded. Once the provider has accepted the text, a later delivery failure does not automatically return the credits.