SMS Overage Fee Monitoring

Created by Emily McClendon, Modified on Sat, 27 Jul at 3:22 PM by Alyssa Elso

How to monitor your SMS usage and potential overage fees

Due to the recent implementation of A2P 10DLC Fees and SMS overage fees, we have made it simple for you to track the number of messages being sent and received to help monitor your usage and potential overage charges.

From your Practice IQ page, you will navigate to the Advanced drop-down and select the SMS Usage dashboard.

These are the following panels you will find on this dashboard.

In this panel, you will see your Sent and Received message count, SMS delivery rate, and the individual sent and received message count.

In the next panel, you can scroll through additional message KPIs. An important one to note is the SMS Segment Per Message.

SMS messages are divided into segments for transmission. A standard SMS message can contain up to 160 characters (including spaces). If a message exceeds this limit, it will be broken into multiple segments, each containing up to 153 characters.
Concatenation information is used to link these segments together on the receiving end, ensuring that the complete message is displayed.

To avoid overages, you will want to keep this number at 1. Anything over 1 means the message has exceeded 160 characters and has been separated into two messages.

Here is a Messaging Segment Calculator to verify the length of your message and ensure you are not going over.