Channel billing

Every channel is paid for from the same credit, but each one bills a different unit. SMS is counted in parts, Viber and RCS per message, WhatsApp has a price made of two components, Voice is measured in seconds off a per-minute rate, and with Mobile Connect you only pay for the brokering — the SMS itself is sent by your own operator.

Channel comparison

Prices for a given country are in the price list — in the portal both in your wallet's currency and in credits, or in the public price list on the website.

SMS is paid for in parts

One SMS holds 160 characters, or just 70 with accents and emoji. Longer text is split into parts and each part is billed as a separate SMS — even though the recipient sees a single message. The details are covered by Message concatenation and Unicode.

The price of a single part depends on the country, the recipient's network and the sender type. That is why the price list shows prices per sender type, and per individual operator once you expand a row.

Mobile Connect charges for brokering only

Mobile Connect sends the SMS from your own phone — using the SIM and the tariff you have in it. BulkGate charges only a fee for such a message, which the price list describes as “BulkGate's fee for brokering the sending of the message”. What the SMS itself costs is up to your mobile operator.

That has two consequences: the message goes out from your own phone number, so there is no sender registration to deal with — and both speed and volume are limited by a single phone, not by our gateway.

Viber bills by message type

The price list holds five Viber rates and the portal picks between them by how and to whom you send the message. All of them require a registered Viber sender.

The message types and their content limits are covered by Viber message types.

The international rate

Every new Viber sender has a home country set — the country it was registered for. Viber itself applies this practice to new customers. The home country decides which rate a message is charged at:

So you do not choose the international rate — the portal applies it by itself as soon as the recipient's country differs from the sender's home country. You will find its amount in the price list under the recipient's country as the International rate.

Example. A sender with Czechia as its home country sends the same promotional message to two recipients. The recipient in Czechia is charged the promotional rate for Czechia, the recipient in Slovakia the international rate for Slovakia.

Special rates for loans and gambling

Senders in the loans and gambling business have their own prices. You will find them in the price list in a separate Loans and gambling section as International special rate, Transactional special rate, Promotional special rate, OTP special rate and Session special rate — a counterpart to each of the five regular rates.

You do not choose them: they apply on their own as soon as your Viber sender is flagged for that business on our side. The whole channel price list then switches to the special rates for that sender.

Minimum monthly commitment

On top of that, a registered Viber sender carries a minimum monthly commitment towards Viber. Its amount varies by country and you will find it in the price list. It shows up in transactions as a separate item. The conditions are described in Terms and conditions of Viber Business.

RCS bills by content

The portal picks the rate itself, based on what the message contains — basic, single or session. The basic rate goes only to text of up to 160 characters with not a single button; anything richer is billed as a single message, and a reply from the recipient opens a session.

With RCS, prices for a number of countries are also on demand, and operators charge monthly agent fees. For such countries the price list shows that instead of a price per message.

WhatsApp has a two-part price

With WhatsApp, two items add up:

1. The BulkGate fee for every message sent — that one is in our price list.
2. The fee charged by Meta for a template message — it varies by country and message category (marketing, utility, authentication). The rates are summarised in WhatsApp conversation pricing.

The Meta fee falls at the moment you open a conversation with a template message, or reach out to the customer after 24 hours. When the customer writes first, a 24-hour service window opens and your replies inside it are free of charge on Meta's side.

Voice is billed in seconds off a per-minute rate

For Voice, the price list states a price per minute, but calls are not billed in whole minutes. How the price of a given call is worked out from the per-minute rate is set by two values in the Call tariffing table:

Both values differ by country, so always look them up for the destination you are sending to.

An example. A rate of 1 credit per minute, a minimum billed time of 15 seconds and billing in 15-second increments:

That is why the price list shows two figures for Voice: the price for the minimum billed time — the lowest a call can cost — and the price per minute below it.

Voice is sent through the transactional route only: from the portal via Send message, as a voice OTP, or from the API. You will not find it in a bulk promotional campaign.

What applies to every channel

• One shared credit. Every channel is paid from the credit of the wallet you send the campaign from.
• Volume changes the price. The higher the amount you top up at once, the bigger the bonus credit and the lower the price per message — see Using the price list and Topping up credit.
• Prices are exclusive of VAT.
• Every movement shows in transactions, split by channel and message type.
• An invalid number is not charged — no message is created for it at all, see Phone number processing.

When a message does not arrive

Each channel treats an undelivered message differently:

With Viber you can see it on the message statuses: only messages in the DELIVERED and SEEN states are billed, while ERROR, RECIPIENT UNAVAILABLE and DND are returned once they expire.

Messages that never come into existence are a different case altogether — those are never billed:

• an invalid phone number,
• a number on the blacklist or opted out,
• a message evaluated as a duplicate,
• a country prohibited in your sending restrictions.

Why a message did not arrive and what to do about it is covered by Message was not delivered.

What a cascade costs

When you turn on several channels in a campaign, the message is first tried on the first of them and only moves to the next one if that fails — how exactly is described in Channel cascade. So you pay for the messages that actually go out, not for every channel in the row.

That is why the estimate in the last step of a campaign works with coverage — an estimate of what share of recipients each channel will reach. You can change the default values, see Changing coverage. The real cost differs from the estimate depending on how many recipients each channel actually reached.