Learn about SMS pay-as-you-go, how to use the rate card, and where to find your spend limit and set spend alerts.
Overview
Our SMS pay-as-you-go feature lets you send SMS using our rate card. This means you’re only ever charged on your regular invoice for what you spend each month. As part of pay-as-you-go, we offer tools to help make sure you don’t overspend.
Set up pay-as-you-go
If you’ve never used SMS before, you must purchase a number and activate the SMS pay-as-you-go rate card.
To learn more about purchasing a number, check out the Purchase an SMS number.
If you’re already using SMS with credits, you must contact us to swap from credits to pay-as-you-go.
Using the rate card
We list our prices for SMS pay-as-you-go on our rate card. To view your rate card, go to Settings (â‹®) > Account > SMS settings.
The rate card prices might change once a month, so look at them regularly to better understand the cost of sending to your chosen countries.
Spend limit and alerts
When you set up SMS pay-as-you-go in-app, we give you an automatic spend limit per month.
The monthly spend limit is set to be high enough that you shouldn’t ever hit it. This prevents issues with a spend limit set too low and being inadvertently reached, causing SMS sends to stop unexpectedly.
To help you to control your SMS spend, you should set an email alert to be sent when your spend reaches the specified amount.
To do this:
- Go to Settings (â‹®) > Account, then select the Account settings tab.
- Select the Enable SMS pay-as-you-go alerts check box.
- Enter an alert amount in the box.
- Select SAVE SETTINGS.
These notifications are sent to the account owner and users with the Can manage account permission enabled
Know what you’ve spent
Once you start sending SMS using pay-as-you-go, you can see what countries you’ve sent to, and at what price.
To see this, go to Settings (â‹®) > Account > SMS settings and look under the heading SMS segments sent.