In the US and Canada, SMS and MMS carrier fees are typically small surcharges applied by mobile carriers on certain types of message traffic. Carrier fees, where applicable, are charged per message segment for SMS, and per message for MMS. Twilio passes such fees through to our customers.
Some carriers charge fees on long code SMS (messages sent from a 10-digit US/Canada Twilio number). Other carriers only charge fees for SMS sent from a short code number. For information on SMS costs as well as the carrier fees for specific mobile carriers, please see the following pricing resources:
Recent Changes to SMS and MMS Carrier Fees
We make every effort to notify customers as soon as possible when a destination carrier alerts us that they intend to begin charging additional fees for messages. We'll notify messaging customers via their project's email address, as well as creating a new article here on our support site.
Here are the latest carrier fee notification articles we have published:
- United States Carrier Penalties for Non-Compliant Messaging: please note, these are not standard carrier fees, but penalties for messaging compliance violations; see the article for details.
- Commercial Long Code SMS Product and Fee Structure Changes on Verizon
- New North American Long Code SMS and MMS Carrier Fees (March 2019)
- New Bell and Virgin Mobile Canada Long Code Carrier Fees (December 2018)
- New US Short Code Carrier Fees (Summer 2018)
Viewing your Carrier Fees on the Usage page in Console
The Twilio Console Usage page shows a breakdown of your Twilio usage and associated charges on a monthly basis. On this page, carrier fees are displayed as the following separate line items:
- SMS Carrier Fees
- MMS Carrier Fees
Retrieving Carrier Fee Information with the Usage API
You can use our Usage API to retrieve carrier fee usage data for your account. Carrier fee data can be retrieved using the following categories:
sms-messages-carrierfees
mms-messages-carrierfees
Here’s an example cURL script:
curl -G https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/Usage/Records.json \
-d "Category=sms-messages-carrierfees" \
-d "StartDate=2018-12-01" \
-d "EndDate=2018-12-31" \
-u 'ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX:your_auth_token'
This example retrieves all SMS carrier fees that were charged to your Twilio project (and any subaccounts) between December 1 and December 31, 2018.
To make this script work for you, make the following updates, and then paste it into a terminal window:
- Line 1 update with your Account SID
- Line 3 update with the desired results start date
- Line 4 update with the desired results end date
- Line 5 update with your Account SID and Auth Token
For more information and code samples, please see REST API: Usage Records (Twilio Docs).