# Cost calculator

Estimate what your messages will cost before you send: pick a country and a volume, and compare the price across plans.

**Language:** en
**Audience:** platform
**Translation key:** platform.billing.cost-calculator
**Search keywords:** cost calculator, calculator, sms calculator, price per sms, estimate cost, cost per country, compare plans, how much does it cost
**Related pages:** /platform/es/billing/cost-calculator, /platform/en/billing/pricing-conditions, /platform/en/billing/wallet-balance
**Docs index (every page):** https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt
**This zone's index:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/llms.txt
**This page:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/billing/cost-calculator/ (HTML) · https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/billing/cost-calculator.md (Markdown)
**Other language (es):** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/es/billing/cost-calculator.md

Before you launch a send, the cost calculator lets you get a sense of what it will cost. For now it works with **SMS**: you enter a country and a number of messages, and it gives you back the price per message and the total. It also sets that price next to each plan's, so you can see at a glance how much a higher plan would save you.

{/* VERIFY: today this is the SMS Calculator (SMS only), not multichannel. Confirm whether to document it as SMS-specific or wait for a channel-neutral version before generalizing the wording. */}

## Where to find it

Open **Settings > Organization** and go to the **SMS Calculator**. You can also open it from the **⋮** menu of the **Balance** card in **Billing**.

![The SMS Calculator screen with a country and message-count row, showing the price per SMS and the price compared across plans](/platform/en/billing/images/cost-calculator--1-sms-calculator.png)
*The SMS Calculator: enter a country and a number of messages to see the price per SMS and compare it across plans.*

## What you can set

- **Country** — the destination country. It defaults to your organization's country. The price per message depends on the destination.
- **Number of messages** — how many messages you plan to send. You can add several rows to compare different volumes.

## Reading the result

For each country and message count, the calculator shows:

- **The price per message** for that destination.
- **The total** for the volume you entered.
- **The price under each plan** (Free, Premium, Business), highlighting your current plan as **your price**. Higher plans get a better per-message price, so the comparison shows what you would pay on each one.

It also tells you how many messages your included monthly credit gets you in that country.

> **Note**: The cost of a campaign depends on the number of messages, which in turn depends on the length of each message. A longer message can split into more than one part, and each part counts as a message. See [SMS essentials](/platform/en/channels/sms/sms-essentials) for how message length affects the count.

## Related

The calculator is the interactive tool; how pricing works and the conditions that apply are explained in [Pricing](/platform/en/billing/pricing-conditions).

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This is one page of the Instasent documentation. For the complete machine-readable index of every guide and API reference, fetch https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt — start there for full context.