Content And Credits

Content Length

Every message must contain 1-918 characters.

The API counts JavaScript string characters and selects one of two segment calculations:

Examples:

This is Notify Africa's current ASCII/non-ASCII calculation. It is not a complete GSM-7 extension-table calculation. Treat the debit returned by the API as authoritative.

Credit Debit

• Single send debits the message's calculated segment count.
• Batch send adds the segment count for every eligible recipient.
• Personalized bulk send calculates each recipient's content independently.
• Scheduled messages are debited when accepted for scheduling, not at dispatch time.
• Provider rejection does not change the debit reported by the send response.

For identical content:

credits required = recipients × segments per message

For personalized content:

credits required = sum(each eligible recipient's message segments)

Response Fields

Same-content batch returns:

• messageCount: messages accepted by the operation.
• creditsDeducted: segments debited.
• remainingBalance: balance after debit.

Personalized bulk returns:

• acceptedCount and rejectedCount.
• results[].estimatedSegments.
• results[].debitApplied.
• creditsDeducted and remainingBalance.

Single send does not expose the debit or remaining balance in its compatibility response.

Cost-Safe Integration

• Validate recipient lists before sending.
• Preview content length after personalization.
• Budget for concatenated and non-ASCII messages.
• Do not retry a send automatically unless duplicate delivery and duplicate debit are acceptable; the public SMS request DTO has no idempotency key.
• Use the Portal to inspect and fund the account before a large batch.