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What are SMS and MMS Carrier Fees?

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:

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).

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