SMS Segment Counter

Overview

Nothing here is sent and nothing is connected to: you hand us the text of a message and we hand back arithmetic, with no gateway, no carrier lookup and no phone number involved. We work out which alphabet your text needs, how many segments it occupies, and how many characters you have left in the last one, using the published GSM 03.38 tables — 160 characters in a single 7-bit segment and 153 in each segment once a message is split, or 70 and 67 when the text needs UCS-2. The surprises are the point. Nine characters cost two septets instead of one, so a 160-character message with a single curly brace in it needs two segments; and one emoji outside the basic multilingual plane eats two of your 70. We show you exactly which characters pushed you into UCS-2, so you can find the one that tripled the bill. We never return the split segments themselves: splitting belongs to whoever sends the message, and handing the pieces back would only be your own text in slices.

Segment arithmetic looks trivial and almost nobody gets it right by hand. Splitting a message costs you seven septets of every segment, not zero; nine ordinary-looking characters cost two septets each; and a single emoji collapses your budget from 160 characters to 70, of which it takes two. The result is a campaign that was priced at one segment and billed at three. We give you the same numbers your provider will, from the published tables, before you send anything.

When to use it

Scope

Non-goals

• Does not send a message, reach a gateway, or open any connection
• Does not return the split segments — counting is the whole job
• Does not look up a carrier, a route, a price or a phone number
• Does not rewrite your text to make it cheaper, and never substitutes a character to squeeze it into GSM-7
• Does not know what your provider charges per segment

Properties

Capabilities

Cost & billing

Flat rate per invocation

File handling

How we handle your data

Input schema

Output schema

API contract

curl -sS -X POST "$BASE/v1/execute" -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"skillKey":"communication.sms_segments","input":{"text":"Northwind: order 4417 ships today and arrives Thursday.","encoding":"AUTO"}}'

import { Squillify } from "@squillify/sdk";

const sq = new Squillify({ apiKey: process.env.SQUILLIFY_API_KEY });

const { output } = await sq.execute("communication.sms_segments", {"text":"Northwind: order 4417 ships today and arrives Thursday. Track it at nwnd.co/t/4417, or reply STOP to opt out."});

Errors

Other limits

Limitations

• Does not send a message, reach a gateway, or open any connection
• Does not return the split segments — counting is the whole job
• Does not look up a carrier, a route, a price or a phone number
• Does not rewrite your text to make it cheaper, and never substitutes a character to squeeze it into GSM-7
• Does not know what your provider charges per segment
• Actually sending the message, which needs a gateway we deliberately do not have
• Getting the segments' text back so you can send them yourself
• Pricing a message, since what a segment costs is between you and your provider

How to call

POST /v1/execute (requires authentication)

{
  "skillKey": "communication.sms_segments",
  "input": {
    "text": "Northwind: order 4417 ships today and arrives Thursday. Track it at nwnd.co/t/4417, or reply STOP to opt out."
  }
}

Examples

{
  "text": "Northwind: order 4417 ships today and arrives Thursday. Track it at nwnd.co/t/4417, or reply STOP to opt out."
}

{
  "extendedCharCount": 0,
  "encoding": "GSM7",
  "summary": {
    "javaCharCount": 109,
    "codePointCount": 109,
    "encodingSelectedBy": "AUTO_DETECTED"
  },
  "segments": 1,
  "charsPerSegment": 160,
  "exceedsMaxSegments": false,
  "charsUsed": 109,
  "concatenated": false,
  "nonGsmCharacters": [],
  "charsRemaining": 51,
  "unitsTotal": 109
}

{
  "maxSegments": 2,
  "text": "Rentrée sale — 30% off everything until Sunday 🎉 Shop now at maisonclaire.example/sale and use code RENTREE30 at checkout."
}

{
  "extendedCharCount": 0,
  "encoding": "UCS2",
  "summary": {
    "javaCharCount": 123,
    "codePointCount": 122,
    "encodingSelectedBy": "AUTO_DETECTED"
  },
  "segments": 2,
  "charsPerSegment": 67,
  "exceedsMaxSegments": false,
  "charsUsed": 123,
  "concatenated": true,
  "nonGsmCharacters": [
    {
      "char": "—",
      "codePoint": 8212,
      "firstIndex": 13
    },
    {
      "char": "🎉",
      "codePoint": 127881,
      "firstIndex": 47
    }
  ],
  "charsRemaining": 11,
  "unitsTotal": 129
}

Recommended use cases

• Show a live segment count and remaining characters while somebody composes a message
• Catch the one emoji or curly brace that turned a one-segment alert into three
• Budget a campaign before you send it, by pricing the segment count per recipient
• Decide whether a template still fits one segment after you add an opt-out line

Avoid for

• Actually sending the message, which needs a gateway we deliberately do not have
• Getting the segments' text back so you can send them yourself
• Pricing a message, since what a segment costs is between you and your provider

Related skills

Composable with

Safety & privacy

• Runs without calling any external service.
• Your payloads are never stored permanently.
• Telemetry captures metadata only — never your payload contents.
• We never train models on your payloads.
• No human reviews your payloads.

Tags