How do I determine limits and track my email, text, and call usage?

Determining the billing implications of scaled outreach

To track your email, text, and phone usage, please follow the steps below to view your usage month to date and for the prior month:

How do I determine my limits?

1. Click on your name in the top right to go to the user profile menu and select "Billing."

2. Your plan is directly under the "Subscription" text. 

3. Selecting "Change Plan" will redirect you to the "Your Subscription" page. Your current plan will be listed next to the other available billing options, and the limits for the various plans will be listed underneath their respective plans. If you don't see your pricing plan, you are on a pricing plan which is legacy and the best way to determine your usage limits it to email us at support@brokerkit.com

How do I track my usage against those limits?

You can just navigate to your billing page. Once you are on the billing page, you will see the below table with your usage stats for emails, texts, and calls.

Texting

• Text Messages vs. Text Segments: Standard texts are 160 characters long, but modern phones and the major telecommunications carriers allow you to send longer text messages split into multiple segments and joined (concatenated) back into one message at the end.
• These long SMS (text only) messages include multiple segments but appear as one message seamlessly to the receiver. You can tell your segment count of a message with our counter seen here:

• Note that certain characters beyond letters and numbers, such as symbols or emojis, can consume more than one character in a text due to the legacy of how texting was built.
• MMS (messages that include images) text segments will always count as three (no more or less) segments.
• The message totals in the usage billing page here show the number of messages sent or received, whereas the segment count shows the number of actual segments underlying those messages.
• Your text message sent first will count towards your monthly total, as well as any reply from the recipient and any additional messages you reply with.
• Also, if you use call forwarding, each reply from the forwarded recipient and any follow-up reply from you will count toward your monthly totals.
• If you are on a plan that includes an allocation of text segments and emails with usage billing for additional emails or text segments, you can track your month-to-date usage with the chart below. For usage billing, segments are the total you should track since usage billing is based on text segments vs. messages, as this is how telecommunication carriers bill.

Calls & Call Recordings

• The billing report includes call usage and recording (in minutes) and will be broken down by totals for each by reporting for that day, week, month, and prior month. 
• Call recording minutes are only relevant to individuals who have enabled call recording on their "User Settings" page. To read more about how to enable call recordings, click here. 

Activity Report

• You can also visit the Activity Report to see who sent emails and texts. Note that the text counts in the Activity Report will differ from the Text Message/Segment counts in the billing report as the Activity Report only shows 1) messages and not segment counts and 2) it only shows outbound texts sent and not inbound texts.

Technical Details of how texts and calls are billed

Please review the tables below for information regarding how calls and text messages are billed to your account. 

Types of Phone Numbers

1. Brokerkit Service Number: the Brokerkit phone number assigned to a user that you call or text contacts from
2. Forwarding Number: The user's mobile phone number that text replies and inbound calls will be forwarded to
3. Multiplexer Number: A number assigned to a Brokerkit contact if they reply to a text you sent them from your Brokerkit Service Number. This is the number that is used to forward their reply to the Brokerkit forwarding number. Each contact will have a unique Multiplexer Number, so they show as separate conversations on your phone, and you can reply to them each directly. This number will stay active for 30 days after the last reply from the contact.

Billing for text messages

We have a text character counter which will notify you when your message contains enough characters to be a multi-segment message, which will also tell you the number of segments the message contains before it is sent.

Billing for phone calls