Overview
One credit pays for one SMS segment in most countries; texts to some countries use 2 or 4 credits per segment (see Credits by country). A short text is one segment. A longer one is split into parts, and you pay for each part, for each person it reaches. SMS alerts to your business use credits too: the business notifications texted to your business’s phone, and the texts a team member gets about new, cancelled and rescheduled appointments when SMS notifications is on for them under Team & resources → Team notifications. A new appointment series is one text for the whole series. How many characters fit into a segment depends on which of two alphabets your wording uses. One unusual character moves the whole message to the smaller alphabet and roughly doubles what it costs. Email never uses SMS credits. Everything on this page is about SMS.Credits by country
Carriers charge very different rates from country to country, and Bella passes that on in credits rather than in a price list. The recipient’s number decides it, not where your business is: a text to a New Zealand number from an Australian business costs the New Zealand rate.
A 2-segment text to a New Zealand number costs 4 credits; the same text to an Australian number costs 2. Writing to one client, the composer’s count shows what the text costs their number before you send, and a campaign’s Review step notes when some of the audience is in a country that costs more.
The two encodings
The per-part budget is smaller than the single-segment one, so a 200-character standard text costs 2 segments: 153 characters in the first part and 47 in the second.
What counts as standard text
Standard text is the GSM-7 alphabet. It covers a to z in both cases, digits, spaces, line breaks, and this punctuation:! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ _ £ ¥ ¤ § ¡ ¿
It also covers more accented letters than most people expect. Every one of these costs exactly the same as a plain letter:
à ä å é è ì ò ù ü ö ñ Å Ä Ö Ñ Ü É Ç Ø ø Æ æ ß
Not every accent made the list, though, and the gaps are not obvious: é and ì are standard, while í, á, ó, ú and a lowercase ç are not. A client name carrying one of those switches that message to Unicode.
Nine characters count as standard but cost two characters each, because of how they are transmitted: ^ { } \ [ ] ~ | and €. So €45 uses four of your 160, not three.
What switches a message to Unicode
One character anywhere in the body is enough, and it moves the entire message onto the 70 and 67 budgets.
Most emoji count as two characters rather than one.
Where Bella shows the count
In the Messages inbox. The compose box under a conversation, and the New message panel, both show the character count and what the message costs that client in credits (“2 credits”), priced by their number’s country; under a conversation, the credits you have left sit underneath. When the client’s number is in another country that costs more, a sentence says how many credits each segment uses there. If the message is on the shorter budget, another sentence says so. On an SMS campaign’s Compose step. You get the character count and segments, how many more characters fit before another segment is added, and the total credits for the audience (segments times clients, with each recipient’s country weight applied). A short line under the counter gives the character budget: about 160 characters per segment, or about 70 with emoji. How credits are counted opens this page. When theAppend "Reply NO PROMOS to stop offers, or STOP for all texts." toggle is on, that footer is part of the count and the line reads “incl. opt-out footer”.
On an SMS campaign’s Review step. Credits required shows the wallet total, with the subtitle as segments times clients (and a note when some recipients are in countries that cost 2 or 4 credits a segment), sitting next to Credits available and your reset date, before you send anything.
On an automated message template. The editor shows the character count and how many segments the text you typed will use, plus the same character budget line. The SMS preview prices a sample rendered message as segments per send, after the variables are filled in. A longer client or service name can still add a segment on top of that sample. How credits are counted opens this page.
Bella’s own wording is already cheap
Every default template Bella ships stays inside the standard alphabet on purpose, and that is checked automatically, so no new template can slip through carrying a curly apostrophe, a long dash or an ellipsis. Values Bella composes for you follow the same rule, which is why a service and its variant render as “Hair Colour - First Colour Appointment” with a plain hyphen. The one deliberate exception is the birthday greeting, which keeps its cake emoji 🎂 because the emoji is the point of that message. Your punctuation is never rewritten: Bella sends your wording as you typed it rather than silently swapping characters. What changes before sending is variables -{{FirstName}} and the rest are filled in first, and you are charged for the message as it actually goes out. In the Messages compose box, which has no variables, the count you see is exactly what you pay.
Keeping a custom template cheap
- Type apostrophes and quotation marks straight:
'and". A curly apostrophe is the most common accidental switch to Unicode, and the hardest to spot afterwards. - Use a plain hyphen
-where you would reach for a long dash. - Write three full stops rather than the single-character ellipsis.
- Draft in the Bella composer instead of Word, Google Docs, Pages or Notes. Those apps replace straight punctuation with curly punctuation as you type, and the swap travels with a copy and paste.
- Spend emoji deliberately. In a marketing campaign to 800 clients, one emoji can be the difference between 800 credits and 1,600.
- Aim to land under 160 characters once your variables have been filled in.
Variables change the length
Bella counts the message it actually sends, after{{FirstName}}, {{BusinessName}} and the rest have been replaced with real values. The composer can only count the token you typed, so a template sitting a few characters below a segment boundary will tip over it for clients with longer names or longer service names.
In a campaign this happens per recipient: the credit check and the charge both run on each client’s own personalised copy, so two clients in the same campaign can cost different amounts.
Leave yourself some headroom under the boundary whenever a template uses several variables.
Where credits come from
Sending draws down in this order:- Your plan’s monthly SMS allowance, which resets on the same day every month
- Additional credits - purchased credit packs, your Messages Plus renewal credits, and any credits our team adds to your account (shown as a support gift). These never expire and roll over
- Auto-top-up, if you have switched it on, which buys another pack once both pools are empty
Worked examples
The last row is the useful one: an emoji is only expensive once the message is long enough for the smaller budget to bite.
FAQs
Q: Does email cost credits? A: No. Email messages and email campaigns use no SMS credits at all. Credits are spent on SMS only. Q: Is a long message rejected, or split? A: Split. The parts are reassembled so your client sees one message, and you pay for each part (one credit a part in most countries, 2 or 4 in some). A single SMS is capped at 640 characters in the composer. Q: Do line breaks cost anything? A: A line break counts as one character, the same as a letter. A blank line between two paragraphs is two. Q: Are accented client names expensive? A: Some are, some aren’t.é, ä, ø and ß are standard text and cost nothing extra. í, á, ó and a lowercase ç are not, and one of them in the body switches that message to the 70-character budget.
Q: Do automated reminders count the same way?
A: Yes. Reminders, confirmations and the rest are counted exactly like a message you typed, on the wording that goes out after variables are filled in.
Q: Do texts to overseas numbers cost more?
A: A text costs the rate of the country the number belongs to, not where your business is: 1 credit a segment in most countries, 2 in a few, 4 everywhere else. The table is under Credits by country. Replies from your clients never cost credits, wherever they are.
Q: A client replied to me. Did that cost a credit?
A: No. Credits are charged on messages your business sends, not on messages you receive.
Q: My campaign says it needs more credits than the message has segments. Why?
A: Because the message goes to everyone in your audience. A 2-segment campaign to 300 clients in 1-credit countries needs 600 credits; clients in a 2- or 4-credit country add their weight. The Review step shows that total before you send.
Q: Can I see what a message cost after it was sent?
A: For a plain message, yes - the composer’s count is what you were charged. For a template or campaign carrying variables, the charge is measured on the message after the variables are filled in, so it can differ by a segment for clients with long names. Your remaining balance is on Settings → SMS credits, and its Credit history lists the credits added to your account, not each text sent.
Q: How do I find out what used my credits?
A: Bella has no single list of every text and what it cost. To trace them, open an SMS campaign from Campaigns to see its Credits used, or an appointment’s Activity tab to see the texts its client was sent. Most of those texts are also in the client’s conversation in Messages. Texts to your business’s phone, team members’ SMS alerts and copies of an appointment text sent to family members on the booking use credits too. A text longer than one segment uses credits for every part, each time it goes out.