SMS.to supports the standard 160 characters for a single SMS part. And up to 70 characters if using Unicode. This standard length includes spaces and special characters in length.
However, you can use more characters per message and it will be technically processed as several concatenated SMS parts and received on the phone as 1 multi-part SMS with more characters than the above limit allows. Prices are calculated by part so you will be charged the price of one SMS per part used.
Unicode (UCS-2) encoding supports a great range of characters and languages compared to the very limited alphabet of 7bit encoding. If your message contains any characters not listed in the 7-bit alphabet, UCS-2 encoding is automatically used. In this case, each message takes up a lot more space, thus the message length is reduced to 70 characters. On the other hand, If you only use characters that belong to 7bit encoding the message length can be up to 160 characters. We offfer Transcoding as a way to reduce characters in your SMS text.
The best way to check this is to use our Unicode Checker Tool.
When you type your SMS sample, It will show you the live count of characters or SMS parts while you are composing the SMS text giving you full clarity on the expected costs and whether Unicode is detected or not (If detected, click on the small arrow next to Unicode Detected to get accurate info).
Unicode example:
GSM example:
Should you be using our API to send your SMS, you can use one of our estimation API features before sending the message, for example: https://docs.sms.to/api/#estimate-single-message
Please also see: