What alerts cost

Alerts use your church's texts, like event reminders do. Each person gets their own text, so an alert to a big group costs as much as that many texts. Check before you send, and keep all-church alerts short.

How texts are countedStaff

• Texts are counted in segments. Up to 160 characters is one segment. A longer text goes in parts of up to 153 characters, and each part counts.
• An emoji, curly quotes or letters outside the basic Latin alphabet (like Cyrillic) shrink a segment to 70 characters (67 per part).
• The link from Include Link is part of the text.
• The cost is the segments times the number of people it goes to. A 2-segment alert to 150 people is 300 segments.

See What's an SMS segment? for more.

Check before you sendStaff

1. 1
   Write the text and pick who gets it.
2. 2
   Select Check Cost of Delivery 1 (marker 1 on the screenshot).
3. 3
   Read the Message cost 2 (marker 2 on the screenshot): the segments in one text, and its encoding. The encoding changes when emoji or special letters make each segment smaller.
4. 4
   Read the Total cost 3 (marker 3 on the screenshot): the segments for everyone you picked, in SMS credits (one per segment).

123

The total counts each person once, leaving out disabled members and people without a phone number. It also counts numbers outside the US, which are never texted, so it can be a little higher than what is sent. Changing the text, the groups or the people clears it: check again.

What your plan includesStaff

On the $29 plan, 750 text segments a month are included, shared by alerts and event reminders. Past that, each segment is added to the next invoice, up to the spending cap your admins set. See Your plan, this month's use and the spending cap. Churches on an older plan use prepaid SMS credits instead.

At the spending capStaff

Once the month's extra reaches the cap, or when one alert would pass it, that alert goes by email instead of text:

• It goes to the people it was for who have a phone number and an email address.
• The email has the longer message if there is one (otherwise the text), and the link if Include Link was checked. Its subject is your church's name and the first line.
• People without an email address get nothing. An email listing them goes to the contacts Scheduly has set up for your church (What Scheduly sets up for you).
• recipients on the alert counts the people who were emailed.

To text again, an admin raises the cap on the Dashboard (Change the spending cap). During the free trial, texts stop at the 750 included segments.