SMS API for Costa Rica: bulk SMS to +506 numbers
Costa Rica
Calling code +506
- Per SMS segment
- $0.00727
- Messages for $100
- 13,755
- Local language
- Spanish
- Encoding
- GSM-7 or Unicode
What a bulk SMS send to Costa Rica costs
| Messages | 1 segment | 2 segments |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $0.00727 | $0.01454 |
| 1,000 | $7.27 | $14.54 |
| 10,000 | $72.70 | $145.40 |
| 100,000 | $727.00 | $1,454.00 |
Number format in Costa Rica
Mobile numbers in Costa Rica have 8 digits after +506 and no trunk prefix, so the local form 8312 3456 becomes +506 8312 3456 in the to field.
Alphabet and segments
Texts in Spanish fit 160 GSM-7 characters per segment until they use á, í, ó and ú: those letters are outside GSM-7 and turn the message into Unicode at 70 characters per segment (67 per part). For short alerts, write them without those letters to keep one segment; for longer texts, the console names each letter that changed the encoding.
Time zone and timing
Costa Rica keeps UTC-6 all year with no clock change, so 09:00 in Costa Rica is always 15:00 UTC. send_at takes UTC or any ISO 8601 offset, and the console scheduler converts from your own time zone.
Send to Costa Rica with one request
The answer comes back at once with the message id, the country the number was matched to (CR) and the price. A delivered or failed event follows on your webhook, and a failed message is refunded.
For a list, send the same text to up to 10,000 numbers with POST /v1/batches, or a personal text per number in messages.
curl https://bulksmsapi.cc/v1/messages \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $BULKSMSAPI_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"to": "+50683123456", "text": "Your Northwind code is 482913. It expires in 10 minutes."}'const res = await fetch("https://bulksmsapi.cc/v1/messages", {
method: "POST",
headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.BULKSMSAPI_KEY}`, "Content-Type": "application/json" },
body: JSON.stringify({ to: "+50683123456", text: "Your Northwind code is 482913. It expires in 10 minutes." }),
});
console.log(await res.json()); // price: "0.00727", country: "CR"import json, os, urllib.request
req = urllib.request.Request(
"https://bulksmsapi.cc/v1/messages",
data=json.dumps({"to": "+50683123456", "text": "Your Northwind code is 482913. It expires in 10 minutes."}).encode(),
headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["BULKSMSAPI_KEY"], "Content-Type": "application/json", "User-Agent": "northwind-app/1.0"},
method="POST",
)
with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as res:
print(json.load(res)["price"]) # "0.00727"What developers send to Costa Rica
Payment receipts
Electricity providers in Heredia send SMS receipts to customers after they pay their monthly bills online.
Service alerts
Water utilities in Alajuela notify residents via SMS about scheduled maintenance and service interruptions.
Event reminders
Universities in Cartago send SMS reminders to students about upcoming exams and registration deadlines.
More countries in Central America
SMS to Costa Rica: questions
More answers on accounts, payments and the API are in the FAQ.
How much does it cost to send bulk SMS to Costa Rica?
How many SMS to Costa Rica does a $100 top-up send?
How do I write Costa Rica numbers for the API?
What language is best for SMS in Costa Rica?
Are there peak times for SMS traffic in Costa Rica?
Start sending to Costa Rica
Create an account, top up from $40 and send to Costa Rica at $0.00727 per segment, from the console or with one API call.