SMS message length limits

Church Directory follows the technical 160 character limit per SMS.

Church Directory uses 3rd party providers to send different types of communication to your groups.

These 3rd party providers do their billing based on the 160 character limitation of the SMS (hence the name "Short Messaging Service").

Church Directory limits each SMS message sent to this same limitation to avoid unexpected "double message" charges.

My other provider had a 300 character limit

Some text service providers provide a "larger limit" -- however, they are still bound to this same technical limitation.

Often, other services pricing per SMS message is high enough to cover the cost of a 300 character message using two SMS credits. This provider can then average the cost of other messages that stay below the 160 character limit.

But longer messages appear as one SMS from other providers

The SMS protocol does allow for "message concatenation", which adds special information to a series of SMS messages to make it appear as one long message on the phone for the recipient. However, the whole message is still sent using 153 character segments using this method, each billed separately.

Why doesn't Church Directory allow message segmentation?

In the interest of transparency around billing, there is one text field for creating and sending one text message.

This means that one message sent equals one message billed.

You are free to send multiple messages one after the other, to send longer messages.