How do SMS Credits Work

What are SMS Credits?

The SMS Marketing platform on ONE uses SMS credits as a way to send SMS/MMS marketing messages from our platform to your mobile subscribers. The reason that we have to use a credit system is because unlike email, SMS sending costs can vary depending on a variety of different factors including where the recipient is located, the type of message being sent, the contents of the message, etc. As a result of all these factors, the "cost" for sending each individual message can vary.

Simply put, SMS credits are what you use whenever you are sending mobile messages to your customers.

See below to check how many SMS credits are in your account

Note: This will only show once you have gone through SMS Onboarding

How are Credits applied?

SMS pricing is a little complex because it depends on a wide variety of factors like carrier, country, and the current market rates of SMS.

ONE provides you with domestic and international sending phone numbers for free, and we would like to make the sending of it free as well, but unfortunately the SMS providers won't let us.

Here are some relatively accurate ranges that you can expect to see with our system.

US and Canada SMS: Generally between 1-3 credits per SMS
US and Canada MMS: Generally between 3-9 Credits per MMS
International SMS: Generally between 10-20 Credits per SMS
International MMS: We do not support international MMS at this time

1 Credit = $0.01 within our system if you'd like to purchase more

Pro Tip: The best place to check to see how much your out going messages are costing you in terms of SMS credits would be the SMS history page

What's the difference between SMS and MMS?

SMS stands for "Short Message Service". An easy way to think about this, is that any message that is purely text is typically an SMS message. One thing to note is that each SMS is made up of 160 characters. If that limit is exceeded, the message technically gets broken up into multiple SMS message.

MMS stands for multimedia messaging service. The simple way to think about this is any time a text message has an attached file like a picture or a video or a GIF, it gets converted into an MMS message.

Pro Tip: If you're not sure how many parts your message is being split into, you can always paste your message into a character counter to help your message planning.

Updated on: 01/11/2022

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