What a message costs

Most salon software sells you message credits. That model rewards whoever wrote the software for sending more messages than you needed, which is why we don't use it.

Passed through, with nothing added

Texts and emails are delivered by carriers, and carriers charge for them. You pay what they charge us — no markup, no bundles, no credits that expire at the end of the month. There's nothing here we make money on, which means nothing here has an incentive to grow.

The consequence worth knowing: messages aren't free, and no allowance quietly absorbs them. Sending a text to eight hundred clients costs eight hundred texts.

Length is the whole game

A text is billed in parts, and the number of parts depends on the characters in it:

That second row is the one that catches people. A reminder that fits in one text becomes three the moment somebody adds a smiley, because the whole message switches to the wider encoding — not just the emoji. A quote mark pasted in from a document does exactly the same thing without looking like it did anything.

Email doesn't work this way. Length barely matters, and a message costs a small fraction of a text either way.

What actually keeps it down

• Send by email where email will do. Receipts, newsletters, anything long.
• Keep marketing consent honest. A client who never agreed is a message you paid for and shouldn't have sent — see Consent, privacy and deleting someone.
• Narrow the audience. A campaign to the people it applies to beats a campaign to everyone; Choosing who gets it is where that's decided.
• Write short. Not for style — 160 characters is a real boundary and a second sentence can cross it.

Where to see what you've spent

Settings → Messaging usage — under Your plan, beside your AI allowance.

It shows the month so far: what your texts cost, what your emails cost, and — the number nobody has ever shown you — how many segments those texts came to. That last figure is the one to read. A month of 200 messages that came to 600 segments is a month where something in your wording is costing you triple, and the message count alone would never have told you.

Underneath it says what the total comes to as a share of what you pay for RewireBox. If your messaging starts approaching your subscription, the screen says so plainly rather than leaving you to meet the figure on a statement.