SMS notifications are a great way to keep clients up to date on bookings, reminders, and other important information. To send messages, your SalonLife account needs enough SMS credit. Here you’ll find an overview of what SMS credit is, how to buy it, and what affects its cost.

What Is SMS Credit?

SMS credit is a virtual balance you top up on your account, which you use to send SMS notifications to clients. Every SMS sent reduces the amount of SMS credit on your account. Since sending SMS messages relies on the services of SalonLife’s partners, the extra cost of buying SMS credit is charged separately and isn’t included in SalonLife’s monthly or annual fee.

Where and How Do You Buy SMS Credit?

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  1. Open the Apps page.
    Then find Automatic Notifications in the list
  2. Click the SMS Credit button
    In the view that opens, you’ll see how much SMS credit you have. Below that is your purchase history (dates and amounts).
  3. Use the "Buy" option to purchase more.
    Choose the amount of credit you want (e.g. 100, 200, 500, or 1000 SMS).
    The amount shown includes VAT.
    After confirming, the payment is taken from your card and the SMS credit is added to your account automatically.
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‍ When you create a new account, you immediately get 20 SMS credits for testing notifications. Completing the Checklist steps also earns you extra free SMS credit from SalonLife.

Setting Up Automatic Purchasing

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If you want to avoid running out of SMS credit before an important notification, you can set up automatic purchasing:

  1. Click Buy Automatically.
  2. Set a critical threshold — for example, if you have only 20 SMS credits left on your account, the system will buy more on its own.
  3. Choose how much the system should automatically buy once your credit drops below the set threshold.

This way, you always have enough messages in reserve, and you don’t have to manually check whether your credit is running out.

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How Is SMS Credit Cost Calculated?

Beyond the number of messages, the cost also depends on their content:

  • The standard length of one SMS is up to 160 characters. Longer text is automatically split into several SMS messages.
  • Emojis reduce the maximum number of characters. Special encoding can increase the credit cost.
  • Dynamic, or automatically-changing, fields (e.g. "Hi, [Client Name]!") can change the message’s length and cost depending on how long the name is.
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When setting up a message, you’ll usually see right away how many credits it uses. This is shown precisely below the SMS notification preview.

Invoices for SMS Credit

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All your SMS credit purchases are visible, and downloadable as invoices, in the SMS Credit History view, which shows:

  • The dates and amounts of your SMS credit purchases.
  • Invoices for monthly plans or monthly subscriptions.

SMS credit lets you send clients important short messages for reminders, confirmations, and other notifications. If you’ve set up automatic purchasing instead of buying credit manually, you can be sure your messages never go unsent. Using credit also helps you nail down a precise, informative SMS text length, keeping in mind both the 160-character rule and the effect emojis have on longer messages.