Why your SMS in Arabic or Darija is charged as 2 or 3 SMS in Morocco

This unexpected budget surpass is the classic nightmare of SMS marketing campaigns in Morocco, especially when written in Arabic or Darija.

The billing of a SMS is not based on the message perceived by the user, but on "segments" of data transmitted to the network (GSM standard 03.38).

• The GSM-7 alphabet (Standard): It includes Latin letters (A-Z), numbers (0-9) and some basic punctuations. A GSM-7 segment contains 160 characters. If your message is 160 characters long, you pay 1 SMS.
• The UCS-2 alphabet (Unicode): It is required to encode non-Latin characters (Arab, Cyrillic, Chinese), complex French accents (such as "ç" or "œ") and emoji (, ❤️). A UCS-2 segment contains only 70 characters because encoding takes up more space (16 bits instead of 7).

If you write your SMS entirely in Darija using the Arabic alphabet, the network automatically switches all the message to UCS-2.

Example (Facturation): - French message (GSM-7) of 150 characters: 1 Segment = 1 SMS billed. - Darija message (UCS-2) of 150 characters: The limit is 70 characters. The message is therefore split. Worse, in order for the customer's phone to pick up the pieces, the network adds a "concatenation header". The segments go from 70 to 67 characters. - Calculation: 150 / 67 = 2,23. The message will require 3 segments (67 + 67 + 16 characters). You pay 3 SMS.

The cost gap (in Dirhams) is immediate. For a base of 10,000 contacts (at 0.65 MAD per SMS, Starter rate with a validated Sender ID), a simple change of language or the addition of an emoji can increase the bill from 6 500 MAD to 19 500 MAD.

The most common mistake is to use an invisible Unicode character. Sometimes a message written in French switches to UCS-2 (and thus to 70 characters max) simply because you did a "copy-paste" from Word that turned a simple straight apostroph ` into curved typographic apostroph ` (which is a Unicode character).

Before any mass sending to [Morocco] (/fr/tariffs/), pass the exact text of your campaign into a "SMS Length Calculator" tool. Most good SMS provider dashboards tell you in real time if your message is detected as GSM-7 or UCS-2, and how many segments will be charged.

If you need to optimize your budget, here are some practical rules:

1. The Darija in Latin characters (Franco-Arabic): This is the best compromise.Writing “Mabrouk l3id” in Latin characters keeps you in GSM-7 (160 characters).
2. Banned Emojis if the budget is tight: A single smiley converts the entire message into UCS-2.
3. Clean your copy and paste: Type your text directly into your provider’s interface or in a raw text editor (Notepad) to avoid “smart” tricks and apostrophs in Microsoft Word.
4. Accept the extra cost of literary Arabic for institutional: If you communicate for a bank or public body, Arabic is mandatory.In this case, assume the extra cost associated with UCS-2, but be extremely concise. Go straight to the goal to stay below 67 or 134 characters (1 or 2 SMS max).