SMS Segment Counter
A live counter that tells you the encoding (GSM-7 vs Unicode), the character count, and exactly how many SMS segments your message will be billed as — and how close you are to the next segment.
Carriers bill SMS by the segment, not the message. A single GSM-7 segment holds 160 characters — but add one emoji and the whole message flips to Unicode encoding, where a segment is only 70 characters. This counter shows the encoding, character count, and segment count live as you type.
How it works
If every character is in the GSM-7 basic or extension set, the message uses GSM-7 encoding: 160 characters in a single segment, or 153 per part once the message spans multiple segments (the extra 7 bytes per part carry the concatenation header). Any character outside that set — most emoji, many accented or non-Latin characters — forces UCS-2 / Unicode encoding: 70 characters single, 67 per part.
Segments matter because you pay per segment. A 161-character GSM-7 message costs twice as much to send as a 160-character one. Plug your volume into the 10DLC Cost Calculator to see what segment counts do to your monthly bill. Everything here runs in your browser.