Track your school's text message usage
For school admins: where to see how many announcement texts your school has sent against its yearly allowance, and what happens past it.
Text messages are the one thing in Lumicura with a meter on it. Everything else is included flat in your school’s plan; texts come with a yearly included allowance, and it’s worth knowing where you stand before the snow-day season.
See where you stand
Open Admin › School settings › Billing and find the Text messages card. It shows messages used this year against your included allowance, with a meter that turns red if you’ve gone past it. Within the allowance, that’s the whole story — included in your plan, nothing extra to pay.
Past the allowance, the card shows the estimated overage cost, billed with your school’s next invoice — no surprise line items, the number is right there all year.
What counts against it
One text to one family is one message. So a single urgent announcement sent by SMS to 300 opted-in families is 300 messages — the count scales with your opted-in list, not with how many announcements you send. Texts only go out for announcements you explicitly mark urgent with SMS delivery (see Post an announcement), so the allowance is spent only when a person decides something warrants it.
Two practical levers if the meter climbs faster than expected:
- Send fewer, truer sirens. “Use SMS like the siren it is” is budget advice too — routine news belongs in push and the digest, which cost nothing.
- Keep messages lean. Very long texts count as multiple carrier segments behind the scenes; a headline plus the app link is the right shape anyway.