How SMS Credits Are Priced in Funnel Tools

Text messaging is the one line in a funnel tool's bill that nobody can forecast from the plan card. Email is usually sold in sends per month. SMS is sold in segments, or credits, or monthly message bundles, and each unit means something different. Worse, the unit is not the number of texts you wrote: a message longer than 160 characters quietly becomes two. Below are the published rates from HighLevel, ActiveCampaign, Keap and Kartra, read on October 21, 2026, and the two pricing pages where the word SMS does not appear at all.

The billing unit is the segment, not the message

HighLevel's own guide states it directly: "Each segment consists of 160 characters if GSM-7 encoding is used. If the message exceeds this limit, it will be broken into multiple segments, increasing the cost."

The same article is specific about the thresholds: "having between 161 to 320 characters will automatically result in 2 segments, having between 321 to 480 characters will result in 3 segments". Non-Latin characters cut the limit to 70 per segment.

That single fact explains most surprise bills. A 180-character promotional text to 5,000 contacts is not 5,000 billable units. It is 10,000. An emoji in the subject can double the count on its own.

HighLevel prices per segment and publishes every surcharge

HighLevel's phone pricing guide is the most itemised of the four. For the US and Canada it gives outbound and inbound SMS at "$0.00747" per segment, noting "A 10% discount is applied to the $0.0083 list price for both local and toll-free numbers".

Numbers are rented separately: "Local Numbers $1.15 / month" and "Toll-Free Numbers $2.15 / month". Outbound MMS in the US is listed at "$0.0220", with inbound at "$0.0165 (Local) / $0.0200 (Toll-free)".

Then come the carrier surcharges, "passed through by the recipient's carrier" on top of the base rate. The table gives outbound SMS at "AT&T $0.0035", "T-Mobile $0.0045", "Verizon $0.0050" and "All Other Carriers $0.0042".

US registration is a separate line again. The guide lists a one-time "$22.50 (incl. $3 Fast Track)" for Sole Proprietor and Low Volume campaigns, "$64.00" for High Volume, plus recurring monthly campaign fees from "Upto $2.10" to "$10.50 /Campaign".

One caution. HighLevel's cost-calculation guide worked its example at "$0.0083" per segment on the same day its pricing guide quoted "$0.00747". Both are the vendor's own pages. Budget with the higher figure and confirm the rate in your own wallet screen.

ActiveCampaign prices in credits and does not publish the dollar price

ActiveCampaign meters SMS in credits rather than segments. Its supported-countries article gives a table of "Credits per message sent": the "United States 1 - SMS 3 - MMS", "Canada 1", "United Kingdom 5", "Netherlands 11" and "Switzerland 8".

The number of credits therefore depends on where the contact is, not on what you sent. A single automation that reaches American and Dutch subscribers draws eleven times more credits for the Dutch ones.

What the help centre does not publish is the price of a credit. The purchase article walks through the billing screen and says only that "The modal will display the total cost of your SMS credits". We found no dollar figure on either page.

Two constraints are published, and both matter. "You must have a Plus, Professional, or Enterprise plan to purchase this add-on", and "Unused SMS credits do not rollover to the next month".

That second line is the one to price in. Credits bought and unused are gone at the end of the month, which makes over-buying as expensive as under-buying. For the plan tiers underneath, see ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp plans.

Keap sells monthly message bundles with a published overage

Keap takes the third approach: fixed bundles. Its pricing page lists six text marketing tiers with "Price Included, $24/mo, $39/mo, $79/mo, $139/mo, $279/mo" against "Messages 500, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000".

Tier 1 is bundled: "Tier 1 (500 messages and 100 voice minutes) is included with your Keap subscription, and you may upgrade to higher tiers at any time." A toll-free number is listed as included.

Overage is published too: "Usage over your plan's allotment is charged at $0.015 per text message and $0.01 per voice minute." The page also restricts the feature, stating it "is currently only available to users in the U.S."

Keap's platform price is "Starting at $299/mo (Billed at $2,988/year)" with two user licences included. At Tier 3 that is $39 for 2,500 messages, or about 1.6 cents each, roughly double HighLevel's per-segment rate before carrier fees.

Kartra folds SMS into the email allowance

Kartra does not meter SMS separately at all. Its Essentials card reads "10,000 emails/month - Send 10,000 emails & text messages to engage your audience", so a text spends the same allowance as an email.

From the Starter plan upward the cards read "Unlimited email & SMS - Send unlimited emails & text messages". Starter is listed at "$119 /mo" monthly and "$99 /mo" billed annually.

Treat that unlimited label the way you would any other: as a claim about the plan, not about the carrier. The pattern is the one we take apart in unlimited funnels is not unlimited.

Two pricing pages do not mention SMS at all

We searched the rendered text of both the ClickFunnels and Kajabi pricing pages on October 21, 2026. Neither contained the string "SMS" or "text message" anywhere, including in their feature comparison tables.

That is not proof the feature does not exist somewhere in either product. It does mean neither page lets you budget for texting, which is itself a planning answer. Compare the rows each page does publish in GoHighLevel vs ClickFunnels plans.

Four questions that produce a real number

• What is the billing unit: a segment of 160 characters, a country-weighted credit, or a flat message?
• Is the number rental separate, and is there a one-time plus monthly registration fee on top?
• Are carrier surcharges passed through, and is the published rate before or after them?
• Do unused credits roll over, and can you buy the feature on your current plan at all?

Answer those four and you can forecast. Skip them and the texting line will not match your estimate in any month where a campaign runs long. The same discipline applies to the contact meter in what funnel builder contact limits actually count.

If you are also buying audio or voice minutes in the same stack, the credit maths behaves identically. See ElevenLabs credits and what funnel audio costs and, for chat-based follow-up instead of SMS, our ManyChat review.

And before you commit to any of them, price the whole bill rather than the plan card, using how to read a funnel builder pricing page and how to read an email automation pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

What is an SMS segment?

A billing unit, not a message. HighLevel's guide states each segment is 160 characters in GSM-7 encoding, and that 161 to 320 characters bills as two segments. Non-Latin characters reduce the limit to 70.

What does one text message actually cost?

On HighLevel's published US rate, $0.00747 per segment plus a carrier surcharge of $0.0035 to $0.0050, so roughly 1.1 to 1.3 cents for a short text. Keap's published overage is $0.015 per message.

How much does an ActiveCampaign SMS credit cost?

We could not find a dollar price on its help pages, read October 21, 2026. The purchase article says the cost appears in the billing modal. Published facts: the US is 1 credit per SMS, 3 per MMS.

Can I send SMS on a cheap plan?

Not always. ActiveCampaign's article states you must have a Plus, Professional or Enterprise plan to buy the SMS add-on. Kartra bundles texts into a 10,000-per-month email allowance on Essentials at $59 a month.

Do unused SMS credits carry over?

On ActiveCampaign, no: "Unused SMS credits do not rollover to the next month." Keap's tiers are monthly allotments with overage billed at $0.015 per message rather than carried forward.

Why do two pages from the same vendor give different rates?

They can and do. HighLevel's pricing guide quoted $0.00747 per segment while its cost-calculation guide used $0.0083 on the same day. Budget with the higher number and verify in your own billing screen.

Bottom line

Per-segment pricing is the cheapest and the hardest to forecast. Bundles are the easiest to forecast and the most wasteful. Credits sit in between, and ActiveCampaign's refusal to publish a credit price makes comparison shopping impossible from the outside.

Before you choose, write your actual message, count its characters, and multiply by your list. Then read the carrier and registration rows. Confirm every figure on the vendor's page: these rates move, and ours are a snapshot from October 21, 2026.