Message credits are used for all outgoing texts. In its simplest definition, one message credit is an outgoing text of up to 160 characters to a single recipient. For example, if you send a message of 150 characters (1 credit) to 50 people, you have used 50 message credits.

All free Gloo accounts currently have 10,000 credits per month available to use, and the vast majority of churches use far less than 10,000. Gloo+ accounts have 15,000 credits per month available. If you plan to send a high volume of messages, email us at support@gloo.us and we can talk you through potential plans!

You can view how many message credits you have left in the bottom left corner of your Messaging tab, above your phone number. This number updates in real time, so each time you send a message it will decrease.

With Gloo, you can send messages that contain text and/or emojis (SMS), as well as messages that contain pictures and other media (MMS). Because of the difference in how these messages are configured and sent, credit usage varies slightly between these 2 types.

You can read more details below, but for the short and sweet version, you can think of it this way:

So, the maximum number of credits that will be spent for any message you send on Gloo is 3, per contact that message is sent to.

Because the texting industry as a whole counts SMS messages as something called "segments", Gloo counts segments the same way. In Gloo, one SMS segment = one credit. Unfortunately, there are some guidelines for defining segments that are out of our control. For all the technical details on message segments, visit this article from one of our partners.

Remember, SMS messages are text messages that contain only text and/or emojis (no media or pictures). Basically, when sending an SMS message over 160 characters, the message gets split into segments of 153 characters. A recipient's device shows the text as one message even though there are multiple segments.

If there are no emojis present in your text message, use this chart for character count:

For example, if you send a message of 310 characters with no emojis (3 credits) to 50 people, you have used 150 message credits.

Emojis change the way a message is sent and how the segments work. If there are one or more emojis present in any of the text, use this chart for character count:

For example, if you send a message of 100 characters with emojis (2 credits) to 50 people, you have used 100 message credits.

Whenever you are typing a message in Gloo, you will see how many characters you have used, and how many credits that message will cost per recipient.

If you are sending a message to multiple recipients, like a Broadcast, the Broadcast preview will tell you how many total credits the message will cost by multiplying the base cost times the number of recipients.