Each month, you receive an invoice for calls and SMS sent during the previous month (covering the period from the issuance date of one invoice to the day before the issuance of the next invoice). For example, the invoice issued on June 30, 2024, includes SMS sent from May 30, 2024, to June 29, 2024.
On the invoice, you will see the Quantity of segments sent during the previous month.
What is segmentation?
The telco industry (carriers and providers), count text messages in "segments."
1 segment is 160 characters (using only a specific range of characters). When writing or receiving longer text messages, they are combined to appear as single messages, even if they contain several segments (up to 10 segments/1600 characters).
You can find more information about segmentation in this article.
Example:
Below, the example company has sent 494 segments of SMS (excluding the middle line, as this relates to inbound (received) SMS).
How to find the number of SMS messages sent
To find the total amount of SMS sent:
- Go to Analytics and then Overview
- Select the correct date range
- Click on Update
- Scroll down to find the total amount of segments sent as well as the total number of SMS sent
To clarify, an SMS segment is a part of an SMS message. Messages longer than 160 characters are typically split into multiple segments, each billed separately. Therefore, while 173 messages were sent, the total billable segments amount to 494.
If you are interested in how to optimize your SMS consumption, please check this article.