Kaleidoscope Connect: How do SMS credits work?

When purchasing SMS as a part of your Kaleidoscope package, you selected a particular number of message credits. This is the total number of message credits you have available to use for sending SMS campaigns. As you send campaigns, we deduct from this number. You can purchase additional message credits at any time.

Because of this, we want to help you keep track of the number of total SMS credits that will be used on a particular SMS campaign. If you use Connect to send SMS messages, you will see a credit counter when writing your SMS message. This will tell you approximately how many credits per recipient will be used to send this campaign. To better understand how we calculate these credits, see below:

When you send an SMS message containing more than 160 characters, the message is split into smaller messages for transmission. Large messages are split into 153-character "segments" and sent individually, then re-assembled by the recipient’s device. Each segment equals one credit.

The effective character limit per segment is 153 rather than 160, because a data header must be included with each segment to ensure correct re-assembly. For example, a 161-character message will be sent as two messages: one with 153 characters and a second with eight characters.

If you include characters such as Chinese script or emojis in SMS messages those can contain up to 70 characters in a single, non-segmented message. These types of messages with more than 70 characters will be split into 67-character segments.

If you have additional questions or are interested in adding credits to your account, please contact your Account Manager.