Green leaky bucket

Don’t pour away your SMS credits

Don’t pour away your SMS credits

Use these cost saving tools from The SMS Works

On average, 18.5% of business SMS credits are wasted.

It’s a shocking statistic.

In fact, the SMS industry largely encourages waste. It’s so common that people have simply become used to it.

Here’s how the wastage happens.

Wastage in the SMS industry

9.8% of texts are undelivered
Almost all SMS companies charge for failed texts when they haven’t been charged themselves. We refund undelivered SMS.

5.7% of messages are just a little bit too long
For messages that are just longer than 160 characters you’ll be charged for 2 SMS. Our AI can help you to avoid this.

2.0% of messages include Unicode characters
Including Unicode in your texts reduces the number of characters in a text to just 70.

1.0% of messages are sent containing emojis
Sending messages with emojis reduces the number of characters to 70 per text.

We’re here to help you stamp out wastage and reduce your SMS costs.

4 free SMS cost saving tools

It’s a little counter-intuitive, but we’re interested in helping you reduce your SMS costs. 

Helping our customers eliminate wastage demonstrates that we want to help you get the most out of SMS, not maximize your spend.

Pay only for delivered texts

Mobile phone

This is switched on for all customers by default. 

We only charge for delivered texts, all undelivered texts sent to UK mobiles are refunded. It’s a fairer and more open way of working.

The average undelivered rate across all our customers is 9.8%, so there could be some significant savings to be had by switching to The SMS Works.

Message AI optimiser

The SMS Works and ChatGPT

5.7% of business SMS messages sent are just longer than 160 characters. So a message that has 164 characters will use 2 credits not 1.

That’s wasteful.

The AI message optimiser will target messages that are just longer than a credit and use AI (ChatGPT) to reduce the message length to save credits and reduce costs.

Any important information like names, dates, times, codes, URLs etc, will be left unchanged and the tone of voice used in the original will be retained.

There are 2 message lengths that can be shortened using the AI optimiser.

161 – 180 characters
307 – 326 characters

Unicode replacement

Unicode logo

Unicode characters usually end up in text messages by mistake. People often copy and paste them from word processors like Word and Google Docs.

Including Unicode characters in your texts reduces the number of available characters to just 70, so each message could use many more credits than you intended.

The usual culprits are the apostrophe and comma punctuation marks. The Unicode versions are just slightly different from the standard ones.

By enabling Unicode replacement in your account, we’ll replace the most common Unicode characters with their standard equivalent.

It’s a quick way of reducing your SMS costs.

Emoji Removal

Emoji removal tool

Cute and friendly they may be, but using emojis in your text messages will reduce the number of characters available from 160 characters to just 70. 

This means your texts could be using 3 credits instead of 1.

By switching on the emoji removal tool in your account, all emojis will be stripped and your precious credits will be saved.

How do I switch on these tools?

The first thing to mention is that access to all our cost saving tools is free for everyone.

Enabling them is simply a case of toggling them on in your account. Our automated systems will take it from there.

Have you tested us yet?

We’re genuinely different from other SMS providers.
As Phil, our Technical Director put it,

Phil Warner

‘The SMS industry has been overcharging for decades. We want to help you control costs as you grow.’

and then more colourfully,

‘We’re not doing the same sh*t.’

So we’d love you to test us.

Open up an account and we’ll add 50 free credits for testing. We’re really sharp on support too, so if you have any questions, we’ll be here to help.

author avatar
Henry Cazalet Managing Director
Co-founder and Director of The SMS Works, a low cost and powerful SMS API for developers. About Henry