SMS credits
How SMS works: prices, buying credits, your monthly allowance, auto top-up, and what happens when you run out.
TimeToBook can text your clients booking confirmations and reminders. Each text uses credits, and everything to do with credits lives in Settings → Billing.
SMS is off until you turn it on
Out of the box, each location sends one email reminder 24 hours before the appointment, and no texts. To send SMS:
- Make sure you have credits (see below).
- Go to Settings → Notifications.
- Tick SMS for booking confirmations, and/or for any reminder.
You can add several reminders, each anywhere from 1 hour to 1 week before the appointment, and choose email, SMS or both for each one. The SMS options are greyed out while you have no credits available. You can also change the wording: see Customising confirmation and reminder messages.
Where SMS is available
SMS is available in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom. It isn't available in the International region yet, because each country needs its own sender registration. If you're in the International region, Settings → Billing shows a Request Your Country button instead of credits, and email reminders keep working in the meantime.
Pricing
Credits are sold in packs of 100:
| Region | Price per 100 credits | Per SMS |
|---|---|---|
| New Zealand | $15 NZD | 15c |
| Australia | $11 AUD | 11c |
| United Kingdom | £4 GBP | 4p |
How you get credits
- Monthly allowance: every paid subscription includes 50 SMS per paid staff member each billing cycle. A team with 2 staff (1 paid) gets 50, 3 staff gets 100, 5 staff gets 200, and so on.
- Prepaid packs: buy packs of 100 credits whenever you like. Anyone can buy them, including free accounts and trials.
The monthly allowance is used first, then prepaid credits.
- The allowance resets each billing cycle. Unused allowance doesn't carry over.
- Prepaid credits never expire and carry over until you use them.
- Trials and free accounts don't get an allowance, so they need prepaid credits to send texts.
| Total staff | Paid staff | Monthly SMS allowance |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 1 | 50 |
| 3 | 2 | 100 |
| 5 | 4 | 200 |
| 10 | 9 | 450 |
Buying credits
- Go to Settings → Billing.
- In the SMS Credits card, click Buy Credits.
- Choose how many packs you'd like (1 to 10 packs of 100 credits).
- Click Continue to Payment to pay securely through Stripe.
Credits are added as soon as the payment goes through.
Checking your balance
The SMS Credits card in Settings → Billing shows:
- Monthly Allowance: how much of this cycle's allowance is left, and the date it Resets.
- Prepaid Balance: credits you've bought.
- Total Available: both combined.
When your total drops below 30 credits, a low balance warning appears.
Auto top-up
To never run out:
- Go to Settings → Billing.
- In the Auto Top-Up card, turn on Enable auto top-up.
- Pick a Threshold (10, 20, 30 or 50 credits).
- Pick a Purchase quantity (1, 2, 3 or 5 packs).
When your total available drops to the threshold, we charge your card on file and add the credits. You need to have subscribed or bought credits at least once so we have a card to charge.
What uses credits
Credits are only used by texts TimeToBook sends to clients:
- Booking confirmations, if SMS confirmations are on. These go out when a client books online, and when you create a booking with Create & Notify in the calendar. Create Booking saves the booking without messaging the client.
- Reminders that have SMS ticked.
Credits are shared across all your locations.
Long messages use more credits
One SMS segment is one credit. Longer messages are split into several segments, and each segment costs a credit:
| Message content | Single segment | Each segment in a multi-part message |
|---|---|---|
| Plain text (letters, numbers, basic punctuation) | up to 160 characters | 153 characters |
| Unicode (emoji, accented letters like é, smart quotes) | up to 70 characters | 67 characters |
For example, a 180-character plain-text reminder uses 2 credits, and adding a single emoji switches the whole message to Unicode, so even an 80-character text uses 2 credits.
To keep each text to 1 credit, stay under 160 characters after placeholders like the client and service names are filled in, and avoid emoji and curly quotes. The Messages page shows a badge on any text that used more than one credit.
When credits run out
If you have no allowance or prepaid credits left, SMS stops sending: clients won't get text confirmations or reminders until you top up. Email confirmations and reminders keep going as normal. When prepaid credits hit zero, business owners get an in-app notification, plus an email unless they've turned that email off.
Things SMS can't do
- No one-off texts. You can't send a custom text to a client from TimeToBook. SMS is only used for confirmations and reminders.
- Replies aren't shown. If a client replies to a text, the reply doesn't appear anywhere in TimeToBook, so ask clients to call or email you instead. The one exception is STOP: a client who replies STOP is opted out of future texts.
Still stuck?
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