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9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
Latest Blog Posts
9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
Marketing
9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
CRM
9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
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Web Design
9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
9 ways to keep your Tekmatix usage costs down
Usage-based billing has one big advantage: you control it. Here is where the money actually goes, and how to spend less of it without doing less.
1. Stop putting emojis in your SMS
This is the single most expensive habit on the platform and almost nobody knows about it.
Texts are billed per segment, not per message. A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment. Add a single emoji and the whole message re-encodes, dropping you to 70 characters per segment.
Not the emoji. The whole message.
A 200-character text sends as 2 segments. The same text with two emojis in it sends as 4 segments. You have doubled your cost for two characters that added nothing.
If you love an emoji, put it in your emails where it is free.
2. Write shorter texts, deliberately
Once a message splits, you get 153 characters per segment instead of 160 on plain text, and 67 instead of 70 on emoji text. The overhead compounds.
Links, line breaks and curly quotes all count too. Curly quotes are the sneaky one, because word processors insert them automatically and they push you into the more expensive encoding without you typing anything unusual.
Paste your draft into a segment counter before sending to a big list. On a list of 5,000, one extra segment is not a rounding error.
3. Move volume to email wherever it makes sense
Email is $0.001 per send. A $5 top-up covers 5,000 emails.
Australian outbound SMS is $0.0773 per segment. So one SMS costs roughly what 77 emails cost.
SMS earns its place for time-sensitive things: appointment reminders, delivery updates, anything where you need it read in the next ten minutes. For newsletters, nurture and general announcements, email does the same job for a fraction of a cent.
4. Be very careful with MMS in Australia
Australian outbound MMS is $0.5250 per segment. US and Canadian MMS is $0.0330. That is a fifteen-fold difference.
MMS is only available in the US, Canada and Australia anyway. Send media anywhere else and it goes as an SMS with a link, which is usually what you wanted in the first place. Consider doing that deliberately.
5. Verify your email list once, properly
Email verification is $0.0037 per address and is charged once per address, not per send. Clean your list before a big campaign rather than repeatedly.
The saving is not really in the verification cost. It is in not paying to send to addresses that were never going to open anything.
6. Audit your premium workflow actions
Premium triggers and actions are $0.015 each. That covers webhooks, Slack steps, Google Sheets steps and ChatGPT steps inside your workflows.
Individually trivial. But a workflow that fires four premium actions per contact, running over 2,000 contacts a month, is 8,000 actions and $120.
Go through your active workflows and check whether every premium step is still doing something you need. Old workflows that nobody turned off are the usual culprit.
7. Release phone numbers you are not using
You pay monthly per number. Australian local numbers start from USD $4.50, mobile numbers from $12.00, toll-free from $24.00. New Zealand toll-free numbers are $60.00.
If you bought numbers for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago, they are still billing. Check Settings > Phone System.
8. Pick one AI tool, not five
The fastest way to an ugly first bill is switching on every AI feature at once to "see what happens".
Start with the single tool that maps to your biggest time drain. Run it a fortnight. Check the actual number in Settings > Billings. Then add the next one.
9. Set your top-up amount to something sensible
Your wallet auto-recharge is yours to configure under Settings > Billings. Set it low enough that a runaway workflow cannot quietly drain hundreds of dollars before you notice, but high enough that your sends do not stall mid-campaign.
Then actually look at the transaction list once a week for the first month. Everything is itemised. Ten minutes of attention early will teach you more about your real costs than any estimate.
Full rate card, country-by-country call and SMS tables, and the email usage estimator: tekmatix.com/rebilling.
