How RCS billing works.

In the US, each RCS message is billed as one of two types, decided automatically by what is in it. Text with reply buttons, a Call button or a link that opens the phone’s browser is Rich, the text rate. Any card, picture, video, carousel, or a map, calendar or in-app browser button makes it Rich Media. Senders that chat can instead pay per conversation: one charge for every message in a 24-hour conversation. Below is every element sorted into its type, what SimplyRCS charges, and the carrier fee added at cost.

Three ways a message is charged

A segment is 160 bytes of text. Most messages are one segment; a long message is billed as several but arrives as one. Rich Media is one flat charge at any text length. File size doesn’t change the price either, except on T-Mobile: its Rich Media fee covers a message up to 5 MB, and each MB above that adds $0.001, sent or received, up to the 100 MB limit. Carrier fees shown are AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon; every carrier is listed on the pricing page.

Every element, sorted

What your customers send and tap

Replies also carry the carrier’s inbound fee, which is the same as the sending fee or lower depending on the carrier, and $0 on Verizon. Typing indicators, delivery and read receipts are never billed, and nothing a customer does on a web page after tapping a link counts as a message.

Device checks

Before sending RCS, SimplyRCS checks that the phone can receive it; if it cannot, the message goes as SMS or MMS at those rates instead. Each check is $0.0004, charged when a check runs, for example before the first RCS message to a number, or when you run one through the API.

Conversation pricing

A sender set up for conversation pricing pays once per conversation instead of per message. A conversation is charged once 4 messages are exchanged within 24 hours, at least 2 of them from the customer and at least 1 from you. One charge then covers every message in that 24-hour window, Rich Media included, even the messages sent before the count was reached: $0.05 on SimplyRCS plus the carrier’s conversation fee. Carriers call this an interactive session. From the customer, typed replies, reply-button taps, shared locations and photos count toward the 4; taps on call, link, map or calendar buttons do not. The carriers’ conversation fees below take effect on 1 November 2026, and Google runs session billing as a pilot, so its rules may change.

Conversation pricing suits long or media-heavy chats and costs more on short ones. Each sender is set up one way or the other, so choose it for senders that chat, such as a support bot, and per-message billing for alerts and campaigns. The same conversation both ways, including carrier fees (each cell shows billed per message, then as a conversation):

Designing messages for cost

• Talk in Rich: text with reply buttons does most of the work of a conversation at the text rate.
• Save Rich Media for the moment a picture, card or carousel earns it.
• Keep texts under 160 bytes where you can, and remember each emoji counts as several bytes.
• A link that opens the phone’s browser keeps a message at the Rich rate; one that opens inside Messages makes it Rich Media.
• Put long interactive tasks, such as browsing a menu or picking seats, on a web page opened from a button: taps on that page are not messages.
• Put chat-heavy senders on conversation pricing and keep alert and campaign senders per message.

Cost worksheet

Put in a month of your own volumes and see the whole bill line by line: what SimplyRCS charges, what each carrier adds at cost, numbers and registry fees, and what is charged once. Every amount is a quantity times a published rate, with its source and date. Where no figure exists, such as taxes that depend on your address, the worksheet says so instead of guessing, and leaves it out of the total. The figures start as an illustrative month for one retailer.

See every rate on the pricing page, and how a full invoice is built on billing transparency. The message types follow Google’s US RCS billing model.