💬 SMS Tool

SMS Character
Counter & Segment Calculator

Real-time GSM-7 and Unicode detection. See exactly how many SMS segments your message uses — and which characters are costing you extra.

GSM-7 Encoding — 160 chars per segment
1 SMS Segments
0 Characters used
160 Chars remaining
160 Per segment
✓ Single SMS — no extra cost 0%
⚠️ Unicode detected. One or more characters in your message require Unicode (UCS-2) encoding. This reduces your limit from 160 → 70 characters per segment, and multi-part messages use 67 characters per segment instead of 153. The highlighted characters below are the cause — replacing them with GSM-7 equivalents will restore the 160-char limit.
Character breakdown — GSM extended (2 chars) Unicode trigger
(start typing to see character breakdown)
Unicode characters found:
💰 Send cost estimator
Total segments sent
1,000
segments × recipients
Estimated total cost
£35.00
at 3.5p per segment
Cost if optimised (1 seg)
£35.00
if message fits 1 segment

📏 SMS Encoding & Segment Reference

EncodingSingle SMSMulti-part (per segment)Trigger
GSM-7160 chars153 charsStandard Latin alphabet + common symbols
Unicode (UCS-2)70 chars67 charsAny emoji, accented char not in GSM-7, non-Latin script

Common characters that trigger Unicode encoding:

😊 Any emoji " " Smart quotes — Em dash • Bullet point é à ñ ü Accented letters © ® ™ Symbols [ ] { } ~ ^ \ | Extended GSM (×2 chars)
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