Carriers that approve RCS content on their networks also price and bill for delivering RCS messages to their subscribers. There are RCS Message types and Billing categories and it's important to distinguish between these concepts - RCS agent billing categories are different from RCS message types. Message types and supported billing may vary by region, but for the most part, Google and carriers define these as below.
Message types (all countries except US)
- Basic messages: text-only messages <160 characters (like SMS).
- Single messages: plain text messages >160 characters, or content-rich messages (e.g. media, suggested actions/replies, cards, carousels, etc).
Note: Standard characters are counted as 1 byte (UTF-8). If your message includes emojis or special characters, each character may use 2–4 bytes (or more). As a result, the character limit per message may be reduced.
Message types (US)
- Rich messages:
- Text-only (< 160 characters). Text above that character count will result in multiple Rich messages.
- Suggested replies
- Suggested action: Open URL
- Suggested action: Dial a number.
- Rich Media messages: Content-rich, including media, videos, files, and all other suggested actions including webview.
Note:
- Standard characters are counted as 1 byte (UTF-8). If your message includes emojis or special characters, each character may use 2–4 bytes (or more). As a result, the character limit per message may be reduced.
- Rich messages in the US behave like SMS. If a message is classified as Rich but has > 160 characters, it will be billed as 2 (or more) messages. If it’s classified as Rich Media, the character limit doesn’t apply.
Billing categories
A billing category is a classification for your RCS Agent that tells carriers how to charge for the messages your agent sends. Businesses register their RCS Agents as Non-conversational or Conversational. The difference is how they are billed and pricing is set by the carriers.
Messages on Non-conversational RCS Agents will always be billed per message - charged as Basic, Single, Rich or Rich Media message depending on what is sent (message types).
Messages sent on Conversational RCS Agents:
- Will be billed as one Single/Basic/Rich/Rich media message, unless the consumer replies.
- If the consumer replies, billing switches to the session-based price. All messages sent and received in a period (generally 24h) are included in the session.
- The clock starts from the time the consumer replies, as long as that message is sent within 24 hours of the MO.
- If a consumer sends in a message to an Agent outside of an existing session, a new session will be started when the business replies
Important:
On Sinch MessageMedia, we currently support only Non-conversational RCS agents.
You can have two-way interactions/messaging with consumers on both Non-conversational and Conversational agents. However, you will be charged per message versus per session, respectively.
Since Sinch MessageMedia only supports Non-conversational RCS agents at the moment, you will be charged per message.