Why are the SMS prices too high?

Please note that the price you see in Amelia/Notifications/SMS Notifications/Pricing is per message segment, not per a single message.

If your language has characters that are not in the list of GSM characters (for example ț, ć, or a dash ( – ) instead of a hyphen ( - ) - notice the length between the two), those characters convert the text from GSM to Unicode. When that happens, the number of characters per SMS segment is reduced from 160 to 70.

You can read more about this here, but in short - GSM (standard, Latin letters) messages contain 160 characters. Large messages are segmented into 153-character segments and sent individually, then rebuilt by the recipient's device. For example, a 161-character message will be sent as two message segments, one with 153 characters and the second with 8 characters.

If you include non-GSM characters like eastern European characters in SMS messages, those messages have to be sent via UCS-2 encoding. Messages containing any UCS-2 characters are limited to 70 characters and will be concatenated into 67-character message segments, even if the messages contain less than 160 characters.

So, your messages are actually split into segments, and each segment is charged as a single message. You can go to Amelia/Notifications/SMS Notifications/SMS History, and in there, you will see a column "Segments", where you will see how many segments were actually used.

The only way around this is to reduce the number of characters in the SMS template and/or remove the special characters that are not in a basic Latin keyboard.

A good tool to see how many characters are used, and if they are in GSM or Unicode can be found here, so you can use that tool to calculate the templates before creating a template. Please note that, if you're using Notification Placeholders, they won't be taken into account, but instead the value they are replaced with, so if your template looks like this:

"You booked an appointment with %employee_full_name%"

It will not be 51 characters long (the length of the template, but the length of the name that replaces the placeholder. For example:

"You booked an appointment with John Doe"

So, 39 characters long.