Bulk SMS pricing in Nigeria: how the cost is calculated

How much does bulk SMS cost in Nigeria?

On Sendozi, SMS costs ₦7.00 per page. There is no setup fee, no monthly minimum and no contract: you fund a naira wallet and each send is deducted from the balance. The same published rate applies to Promotional and Transactional SMS.

Prices across the Nigerian market are usually quoted per page, and per-page rates typically fall as committed volume rises. Sendozi publishes one rate rather than a tiered table, and negotiates separately above 1,000,000 messages a month. The pricing page is the canonical rate; this guide explains how the arithmetic works so an estimate is never a surprise.

What is an SMS page?

A page is the billing unit of an SMS. A short message is one page. A longer message is carried as several linked parts and billed for each of them, which is why message length is a cost decision, not a style decision.

Sendozi resolves pages from the character count of the whole message against a fixed table. The first page ends at 160 characters; each further page adds roughly 146 characters, because linked messages carry a small header that eats into the payload.

Worked examples

Two things stand out from the table. First, the jump from 155 to 180 characters doubles the cost of a campaign - the most valuable editing you can do is getting a message back under 160. Second, cost scales linearly with recipients, so cleaning a list of dead numbers is real money rather than housekeeping.

The formula

const PAGE_THRESHOLDS = [160, 306, 459, 612, 765, 918, 1000];
const PRICE_PER_PAGE_KOBO = 700;

function pagesFor(message) {
  const characters = Array.from(message).length;
  if (characters > 1000) throw new Error("Sendozi caps a single send at 1000 characters.");
  return PAGE_THRESHOLDS.findIndex((limit) => characters <= limit) + 1;
}

function campaignCostKobo(message, recipientCount) {
  return pagesFor(message) * PRICE_PER_PAGE_KOBO * recipientCount;
}

// ₦14,000 for a two-page message to 1,000 recipients
console.log(campaignCostKobo("x".repeat(180), 1000) / 100);

PAGE_THRESHOLDS = [160, 306, 459, 612, 765, 918, 1000]
PRICE_PER_PAGE_KOBO = 700


def pages_for(message: str) -> int:
    characters = len(message)
    if characters > 1000:
        raise ValueError("Sendozi caps a single send at 1000 characters.")
    return next(index for index, limit in enumerate(PAGE_THRESHOLDS, start=1) if characters <= limit)


def campaign_cost_kobo(message: str, recipient_count: int) -> int:
    return pages_for(message) * PRICE_PER_PAGE_KOBO * recipient_count

What you are not charged for

• Sandbox sends. A sk_test_ key records the send, calls no provider and debits nothing.
• Rejected requests. A send blocked by validation, an unapproved sender ID or an insufficient balance is not charged.
• Account features. Contacts, templates, delivery reports, webhooks, API keys and team members are part of the platform, not add-ons.
• Failed sends where the provider rejected the message: the wallet debit is reversed.

Budgeting a recurring send

1. 1

   Count the real audience

   Deduplicate, drop invalid numbers and remove opt-outs before you multiply anything.

2. 2

   Fix the template length

   Write the longest version the merge fields can produce, then count that. A name field can push a message over a page boundary for a subset of recipients.

3. 3

   Multiply and add a margin

   Pages times recipients times the rate, plus room for retries and for the list growing between now and the send.

4. 4

   Fund the wallet before the send

   A campaign that exhausts the balance mid-run stops there. Top up for the whole campaign, not the first half.