Twilio SMS Cost per 1,000 Messages in the US

Twilio quotes one rate and bills two. The published US rate is $0.0083 per 160-character SMS segment, and US carriers add a per-message fee that Twilio passes through automatically: $0.0035 for AT&T, $0.0045 for T-Mobile and $0.005 for Verizon. Add those up and a message to an AT&T subscriber really costs $0.0118 and one to a T-Mobile subscriber $0.0128. At volume, 1,000 messages are $8.30 on the base rate but $11.80 or $12.80 once carrier fees land, and 100,000 messages are $830, $1,180 or $1,280.

Per-message cost by destination network

Carrier fees are added to the Twilio rate (calculated 2026-10-25).

What volume does to the bill

All figures are the published per-message rates multiplied by volume (calculated 2026-10-25).

What the numbers actually mean

There is no volume discount in the published US rate. The same $0.0083 applies at one message and at a million, so the only lever on a large bill is the mix of destinations and the number of segments per message. A 100,000-message campaign to AT&T numbers costs $1,180, and the $350 of that which is carrier fee is 30% of the total (calculated 2026-10-25).

Segments matter more than most senders expect. The rate is per 160-character segment, so a message with a link and a slightly long sentence can cross into two segments and double the cost, and three segments triple it. At 320 characters, the base rate becomes $0.0166 per message and the AT&T total $0.0236 (calculated 2026-10-25), which is the difference between a $830 campaign and a $1,660 one at 100,000 messages.

Carrier fees also mean the bill depends on who your customers are, not how many. The spread between the cheapest and most expensive listed networks is $0.0015 per message, so an audience concentrated on T-Mobile pays 8% more than one concentrated on AT&T at the same volume (calculated 2026-10-25). That is small per message and material across a year of notifications.

MMS is priced separately and flatly. Outbound MMS in the US is $0.022 per message, inbound MMS is $0.0165 for long and short codes and $0.02 for toll-free numbers, and the page does not apply the 160-character segmentation rule to MMS. Sending an image instead of text costs roughly 2.7 times the SMS base rate (calculated 2026-10-25), which is the cheapest way to deliver a long message as a single unit.

How we measured it

Rates come from Twilio's US SMS pricing page fetched on 2026-10-25, where the base rate, the carrier fee table and the segment rule appear in the page's pricing FAQ, and the same rates are repeated on Twilio's general pricing page. No account was opened, no number was provisioned and no message was sent. Totals at volume and per-message sums are arithmetic on published rates and are marked calculated.

What changes in practice

Budget the carrier fee, not the headline rate. A $0.0083 quote is $0.0118 to $0.0133 delivered, so any forecast built on the base rate understates the bill by 42% to 60% (calculated 2026-10-25).

Keep messages inside one segment. 160 characters including the link, at 1,000 messages, is the difference between $8.30 and $16.60 (calculated 2026-10-25), and no volume discount will recover it.

Watch the optional add-ons. The Engagement Suite and Compliance Toolkit each add $0.015 per outbound message, which is 1.8 times the base rate for either one; on 100,000 messages that is $1,500 per add-on (calculated 2026-10-25), larger than the carrier fees themselves.

Bottom line

For 1,000 SMS messages in the US, budget $11.80 rather than $8.30, because carrier fees are charged automatically and land on every message (calculated 2026-10-25). At 100,000 messages the delivered cost is $1,180 to $1,330 depending on the network mix, and keeping to a single 160-character segment is the only saving that scales with volume.