How bulk SMS is priced in Kenya
Your SMS bill depends on three things: how many people you send to, how long each message is, and the price per SMS. Here is how each one works, and how to keep the total down.
How SMS is charged
You pay per SMS part, not per message. One SMS holds 160 standard characters. A longer message is split into parts of 153 characters each (the rest carries the joining information), and every part is charged as one SMS.
So the cost of a campaign is: recipients × parts per message × KES 0.55. A one-part message to 1,000 parents is 1,000 SMS. The same message at 170 characters is 2,000 SMS.
| Message length (standard characters) | SMS charged per recipient |
|---|---|
| Up to 160 | 1 |
| 161 to 306 | 2 |
| 307 to 459 | 3 |
Characters that make an SMS cost more
Standard SMS text uses the GSM-7 alphabet: English and Kiswahili letters, numbers and common punctuation. A single character outside it, such as an emoji, a "smart" curly quote or a dash pasted from Word or WhatsApp, switches the whole message to Unicode. A Unicode SMS holds only 70 characters (67 per part), so the same message can cost two or three times as much.
A few standard characters also count as two: { } [ ] ~ \ | ^ and the euro sign.
Type messages directly into the portal rather than pasting from Word. chat.or.ke shows the character and SMS count before you send.
What a sender ID costs
A sender ID is a one-off cost. Public sender ID fees in Kenya are commonly quoted between about KES 5,800 and KES 15,000, often per network.
Ours is KES 7,500 once. We file your sender ID with Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom, and there is no annual or monthly sender ID charge from us.
Working out a monthly budget
- Count the people you will message each month, for example 800 parents.
- Count the messages each person gets, for example 3 reminders.
- Check each message fits in one SMS (160 standard characters).
- Multiply: 800 × 3 × 1 = 2,400 SMS a month, at KES 0.55 each.
- Top up a little more than you need. Credit does not expire.
Five ways to cut your SMS bill
- Keep messages under 160 characters. Cut greetings and repeated words, not the key facts.
- Avoid emoji and smart quotes, which switch the message to Unicode.
- Clean your list: remove duplicates and numbers that keep failing.
- Send to the right group, not everyone. Tag contacts by class, branch or interest.
- Move two-way conversations to WhatsApp in the same account, and keep SMS for reminders and alerts.