Indicate cost of SMS

[jefft]

It is quite easy for churches to rack up large SMS bills. It would be nice if Jethro could indicate how much an about-to-be-sent SMS will cost. E.g.

Noting that SMSes are billed per 160 characters might encourage senders not to exceed 160 chars unnecessarily.

[tbar0970]

This is particularly applicable when the max SMS length in Jethro is configured to allow multi-part SMS. The default length is 160 I think, which keeps things a bit simpler.

[tbar0970]

Working out the number of message parts required is actually non-trivial. If all the characters in the message are part of GSM-7, a single part can fit 160 characters. But if other more spicy characters are included, each part can hold less characters and more parts are required. The exact behaviour is vendor-dependent. Some vendors might just drop non-GSM-7 characters.
https://www.twilio.com/docs/glossary/what-sms-character-limit

[tim-pearce]

With ClickSend I think (I could be wrong) the limit is 120 characters.
ClickSend tells you the price in the response so one could perhaps keep a history of how much has been sent.

As for the original request here, it may be sufficient to be able to give an estimate of the cost rather than try to calculate the actual cost.