Simple, straight forward pricing.
We believe in simple and straightforward pricing that is primarily usage based. There is no contract, and you can cancel at any time1. For customer support channels, we are not talking about a lot of money, so to keep transactions costs down, you will generally preload an account with $20 and your usage is deducted as you use the service. When you hit a low balance threshold, your account will be recharged.
Optional Services
We provide basic websites with custom email addresses as well. Our typical website set-up charge is only $399 and monthly hosting fee is only $29. If you would like custom email addresses like these:
- support@<yourcarwash>.com
- <yourname>@<yourcarwash>.com
- 123MainStCarWash@<yourcarwash>.com
just email us at info@carwashcommunicator.com and we can set this up for you. We are not providing high-end websites currently. If you would like a very customized website, just let us know and we can provide a referral for you.
- You can cancel at any time, but any balance below the $20 threshold is retained by Carwash Communicator. The value above $20 will be refunded upon request. This is not yet automated but will be in the future. ↩︎
- SMS message length and character encoding
When you send an SMS message containing more than 160 characters, the message is split into smaller messages for transmission. Large messages are split into 153-character ‘segments’ and sent individually, then re-assembled by the recipient’s device. For example, a 161-character message will be sent as two messages: one with 153 characters and a second with eight characters.
If you include non-GSM characters, such as Chinese script, in SMS messages, those messages have to be sent using the UCS-2 encoding. Messages containing any UCS-2 characters will be limited to 70 characters. UCS-2 messages of more than 70 characters will be split into 67-character segments.
Carwash Communicator bills for every segment sent, so if you have a message with, say, 140 characters and only one or two of them are UCS-2, you can avoid the cost of the second segment by removing those UCS-2 characters if you can.
Note: Toll-Free Multi-Segment Messages sent to the US or Canada have a total of 152 characters available for GSM-encoded messages and 66 for UCS-2 messages. ↩︎ - Size limitations of combining text and images
MMS media messaging
When sending text and pictures in the same message (MMS messaging), a message can contain up to 10 images and 1600 characters if the entire message is under 5 MB in size. 1600 characters will take up 4.8 KB, which accounts for roughly 1% of the message size limit.
Carwash Communicator will automatically compress JPEG, PNG, or GIF files to reduce their size if they exceed certain thresholds, to help you fit more images on your message when needed. ↩︎