How usage is counted
Two things are metered: call minutes and text messages. This page is the precise version — worth ten minutes if a bill has ever surprised you.
You can see where you stand at any time in Settings → Plan and usage.
Call minutes
Section titled “Call minutes”What counts
Section titled “What counts”Every connected call, whichever way it ended:
- Calls you answered and spoke on.
- Calls where the caller left a voicemail. They held the line, and the network charged for it, so it counts.
What doesn’t
Section titled “What doesn’t”- A call nobody answered and nobody left a message on. However long it rang, it costs you nothing.
- Calls that failed before connecting.
Rounding
Section titled “Rounding”Every call rounds up to the next whole minute. Individually, not in total.
This is the thing that catches people out. Ten calls of 30 seconds each is 5 minutes of talking — but it’s counted as 10 minutes, because each one rounds up to 1 on its own.
| Actual length | Counted as |
|---|---|
| 12 seconds | 1 minute |
| 1 min 05 sec | 2 minutes |
| 4 min 58 sec | 5 minutes |
If your line takes lots of short calls, your minute count will run well ahead of your actual talk time. That’s normal, and it’s how phone billing works everywhere.
Text messages
Section titled “Text messages”What counts
Section titled “What counts”Both directions. Messages you send and messages customers send you. The network charges for both.
What doesn’t
Section titled “What doesn’t”A message that failed outright — one that never reached a carrier at all. Those aren’t billed.
A message that was sent but not delivered does count. The carrier accepted it; that it couldn’t reach the handset happened afterwards.
Segments, not messages
Section titled “Segments, not messages”This is the SMS equivalent of the rounding trap.
A text is transmitted in segments. A plain-text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Go over and it’s split into parts of up to 153 characters each — a 200-character message is two segments, and counts as two against your allowance.
Emoji and many accented characters are the sharp edge. A single one switches the whole message to a different encoding where one segment holds only 70 characters, and each part of a longer message only 67. So a 160-character message that fitted in one segment becomes three the moment you add a 🙂.
| Message | Segments |
|---|---|
| 140 plain characters | 1 |
| 200 plain characters | 2 |
| 60 characters with one emoji | 1 |
| 140 characters with one emoji | 3 |
| 160 characters with one emoji | 3 |
To keep counts low: stay under 160 characters, skip emoji in routine messages, and use your own short URLs rather than long tracking links.
Where to check
Section titled “Where to check”Settings → Plan and usage shows, for the current period:
- Call minutes used against your allowance, with a bar.
- Text messages used against your allowance.
- Estimated overage so far, in dollars.
- The date your usage resets.
- Your spending cap, and a “Your line is paused” notice if you’ve reached it.
If you’ve gone past an allowance, you’ll see an Over plan badge and a line like “40 minutes over your plan, about $2.40 in overage.”
Previous periods below shows what you used and what overage was billed in each earlier period.
Email warnings
Section titled “Email warnings”Callify emails you when you cross 50%, 90% and 100% of either allowance. Each warning is sent once per period; if you pass several at once, you get one email for the highest.
The 50% email is purely so the number isn’t a surprise later — there’s nothing to do about it.
Hitting 100% doesn’t stop anything by itself. Your line keeps working, and further usage is charged as overage until it reaches your spending cap — at which point the line pauses (calls don’t get through and texts aren’t sent) until the period resets or you raise the cap. With a $0 cap, that happens as soon as the allowance is used.
Why your numbers might look high
Section titled “Why your numbers might look high”Minutes higher than expected — per-call rounding. Count your calls, not your talk time.
Texts higher than expected — segments, and inbound messages counting too. A chatty thread of twenty short exchanges is at least twenty segments.
Usage on a number you removed — minutes and messages belong to the period they happened in, whatever happened to the number afterwards.
Checking the detail
Section titled “Checking the detail”The usage numbers come from the same call and message records you can see, so they’re checkable. Settings → Tools → Export call history gives you a CSV with a duration in seconds for every call — round each one up, add them, and you should land on the same figure.
If it doesn’t match, tell us at support@callify.co and we’ll go through it.