Text credits are consumed whenever you send a text message. Text credits are consumed for each recipient that a message is sent to.
The SMS provider that front Rush uses to send text messages operates on a credit system. You need credits in order to send texts from your Front Rush account. Text message credits in Front Rush are all shared by all coaches in a sport. For example, if you have 3 football coaches using Front Rush, they will consume credits from the shared pool for football. We have developed a new tool to help assist coaches with SMS credits and SMS message character counts. This tool can be found in the Messages section under SMS.
Tracking SMS Credits
The new tool calculates the amount of SMS used when a coach types in their message in FR Essentials. You will automatically be deducted from your available credits depending on the number of characters and recipients. The number of characters allowed in one SMS is 160, anything over 160 will add to the SMS total messages being sent.
Purchasing Credits
Credits can be purchased online by going to the messages section clicking SMS; at the bottom right hand corner of this page, you will see a ' Buy more SMS message' option. Credits are purchased through credit card only. Please note that Front Rush does not make any money from tax credits and only ever intends to cover the cost that the provider puts on SMS communication.
SMS Character Limit
The character limit for a single SMS message is 160 characters. However, most modern phones and networks support concatenation; they segment and rebuild messages up to 1600 characters.
SMS Message Length and Character Encoding
When you send a SMS message over 160 characters, the message will be split. Large messages are segmented into 153 character segments and sent individually, then rebuilt by the recipient's device. For example, a 161-character message will be sent as two messages, one with 153 characters and the second with 8 characters.
What is the history behind SMS message length?
SMS is a standardized communication protocol that enables devices to exchange short text messages. Originally, it was designed to "fit in between" existing signalling protocols, which is why SMS length is limited to 160 seven-bit characters.
But things get tricky because GSM-7, the original character set designed for SMS, only has the ability to denote 128 different characters in those 7 bits. So if you want to include more Latin or non-Latin scripts, you'll need to use UCS-2.
A common mistake is to inadvertently use a UCS-2 character, thinking it's GSM-7 character. GSM-7 isn't a supported character set in many text editors. The classic mistake is to use "curly quotes" not realizing that they're part of UCS-2 and not GSM7.
We recommend that you check any mass messages in our Message Segment calculator before you send them out. It will flag any UCS-2 characters to avoid you being double-charged for messages. If you use Twilio, you can see whether a message was encoded as UCS-2 or GSM7 by viewing an individual message in your console logs.