Billing and wallet
Prepaid wallet, charged per message part at your category price. This page says exactly when money moves and when it comes back.
Prices are per part
A message longer than one part is charged for every part it uses. This is the most common billing surprise in SMS, so it is worth stating plainly: a 300-character message costs twice a 150-character one, and adding a rupee sign to a short message can double its cost on its own.
Message parts and encoding explains when a message becomes more than one part. The compose screen shows the count before you send, and the Pricing page in the panel shows your rate for each category.
Different categories carry different prices, because the operators charge differently for them.
When you are charged
Your wallet is debited when the network accepts a message for delivery, not when you press send and not when it arrives.
You send
We check your balance, your template and your sender ID first. Nothing is charged yet.
The network accepts the message
Your wallet is debited for the number of parts the network reports.
A delivery report arrives
Depending on your account setting, that is either the end of it or the point where a failed message is refunded.
Two billing modes
Every account is set to one of two modes. You can see which on the Billing page, and change it by asking support.
Which mode you are on is per account, and it is not retrospective
Switching modes affects messages sent from that point on. Messages already sent settle under the rule that applied when they were sent, so moving to charged-on-delivery does not refund your history, and moving away from it does not go back and charge for past failures.
Refunds
On charged on delivery, a refund is automatic and needs no action from you.
- It happens as soon as a terminal delivery report says the message did not arrive, for any reason.
- If no delivery report ever arrives, the message is refunded automatically after 48 hours. The wait is deliberately longer than the network's own retry window, so a slow but genuine delivery keeps its charge rather than being refunded and then delivered.
- A refund returns exactly what was charged, at the price that applied when the message was sent, not today's price.
- A refund happens once. Networks routinely send the same delivery report several times, and a repeated report does not repeat the refund.
On charged on send, failed messages are not refunded. That is what the mode means, and it is the reason its per-message price is the lower of the two.
Messages that are never charged
Some messages cost nothing regardless of your billing mode, because they never reached the network:
- Rejected before sending, because the template is not approved, the sender ID is not approved, or the chain is not verified.
- Refused because the recipient number is not valid.
- Refused because your balance is too low.
- Refused because something on our side was unavailable. If a send fails for a reason that is ours rather than yours, you are told the message was not charged.
Reading the ledger
The Billing page lists every movement: what it was for, how many parts, the price per part, and the balance afterwards. Debits and refunds both appear, each linked to its message, so a refund can always be traced back to the send it reverses.
Keep an eye on the parts column rather than the message count. A month where your spend rose faster than your send volume usually means messages got longer or picked up a non-GSM-7 character, not that prices changed.
Running out of balance
A send with insufficient balance is refused before anything is submitted, and nothing is charged. Top up from the Wallet page and send again.
If you send from your own systems, check the balance endpoint before a campaign rather than discovering an empty wallet halfway through one. See Balance and pricing.