The following article outlines general principles to assist Bringg Customers and their Local Support Teams. For specific details on your billing and charges, please refer to your Bringg Service Agreement or contact your Bringg representative.
About SMS Charges
The following details apply to Bringg Customers being charged for sending SMSs via Bringg’s integrated SMS service providers. Different terms and conditions will likely apply to Customers using BringgNow, or Customers sending notifications via webhooks, custom 3rd-party providers or other custom integrations.
By enabling SMS Notifications, Bringg Customers accept responsibility for all applicable SMS fees at the published rates determined by Bringg's third-party SMS providers.
Per Bringg’s standard Terms of Service, Bringg reserves the right to change SMS providers at any time and that costs of sending or receiving SMSs may also change at any time and may vary depending on factors such as country, carrier, message encoding and size/length of the message being transmitted.
Current SMS pricing is available via our providers such as:
If you are in any doubt about who is providing your SMS service, please contact your Bringg representative.
A Little Background on SMS Segments
SMS charges are based not on the number of SMS messages sent, but rather on the number of segments sent.
In the early days of SMS, each SMS message was one segment long, and each message was limited in length to 160 mostly-English characters. Although these SMS network limitations still exist today, modern phones allow much longer messages to be sent and received including accented, unicode and even emoji characters. This is achieved by splitting the message into segments, sending the multiple segments individually and then rejoining (or concatenating) all the individual segments in the recipient’s phone into a single, long SMS message.
You can read more about why and how this process is achieved here:
Calculating and Estimating SMS Costs
In order to help you better understand your likely SMS usage, a count of characters is included in the Settings > Customer Notifications page in your Bringg Dashboard.
It is important to note that the SMS example shown in the Bringg Dashboard (including character counts and segment estimates - referred to in the UI as ‘text messages’) is for guidance only and may vary from your actual SMS costs.
Useful advice on common SMS segment issues and tools such as Twilio’s Messaging Segment Calculator are detailed in the “SMS Segments and Character Encoding” section below.
SMS Segments and Character Encoding
In general, SMS message segments using the standard GSM encoding (a limited set of Latin-characters) are 160 characters for a single segment. When sending additional segments, all segments (including the first) will be shortened to 153 characters in length*.
* The additional 7 characters are taken for UDH data so the phone knows how to rejoin all the segments later.When using USC2 encoding (Non-English/Non-Latin-characters) the initial segments is limited to 70 characters and when sending additional segments, all segments (including the first) will be shortened even further to only 63 characters in length.
In cases where the use of USC2 characters is unavoidable, care should be taken to keep your SMS notifications as short as possible and avoid using
{{placeholders}}(see below).
You should also use tools such as the Messaging Segment Calculator to calculate your SMS segments:In our experience here at Bringg - most unintentional use of USC2 encoding occurred for the following avoidable reasons:
Admin users did not check the segment/text message counter when submitting their SMS Notification messages.
Use of arrows → , emojis 🤗 or other special characters †within SMS Notification messages
Accidental use of “smart quotes” (“66…99”) rather than "quotation marks" ("…")
Use of the wrong type of apostrophes e.g.
'(good!) vs.’(bad!)Copying and pasting directly from an email or Word document with hidden/advanced formatting
Using any character not appearing in the following chart:
Use of Dynamic {{Placeholders}}
Use of dynamic placeholders - such as
{{customer}}for the recipient’s name - within your Customer Notification SMSs look great and can certainly improve end-user engagement.However, if the value which you provide to Bringg to be used in this placeholder is not properly filtered to remove problematic characters and encodings (see above), and the value is not appropriately restricted in character length, then this uncontrolled use of placeholders can result in unexpected cost implications from your SMS notification charges.
Avoiding unrestricted and unfiltered use of
{{placeholders}}may be particularly important in the following cases:In countries and territories using accented characters (such as í)
In locations where customer names and/or street names can be long or of unpredictable length
In cases where the customer name or other placeholder content is user-generated
Still need help?
Please contact support@bringg.com for more assistance. And don’t forget to let us what you already checked and found based on the article above.