A church administrator in Wakiso once asked, not unreasonably, why sending a text to three hundred members cost the church anything at all — didn't the church already pay for a phone, for airtime, for the internet the office laptop used? Why was there a separate line item, a separate balance, a separate number to think about?
It's a fair question, and the honest answer takes a few minutes to explain properly, which is more than most people get before moving on to whatever's next on a busy Sunday.
The short version
Every SMS your church sends — a reminder, a welcome text to a visitor, a harvest Sunday announcement — travels through a telecom-connected gateway that actually delivers it to MTN, Airtel, or whichever network the recipient's phone is on. That gateway isn't free to operate; someone is paying the telecoms for the delivery capacity, and that cost gets passed down, per message, to whoever's sending. FaithDash sends its SMS through the BulkSMS Uganda gateway (app.bulksmsug.com) — the same class of telco-connected infrastructure that independent bulk SMS platforms in Uganda run on. The UGX 35-per-part price isn't a markup FaithDash invented; it's what that underlying delivery actually costs, passed straight through.
That last point matters because it explains something people sometimes assume incorrectly: that a church-specific tool must somehow be pricier than a generic bulk SMS site, since it's doing "more." It isn't. The delivery cost is the delivery cost, whoever you send through — a text message doesn't become structurally cheaper or more expensive to deliver because the platform sending it also happens to know who's a visitor and who's a member.
What "a part" actually means
This is the piece that trips people up most. An SMS isn't priced per message exactly — it's priced per part, and a part follows standard SMS segmentation rules that have been the same across the entire industry for decades, long before any church software existed.
Plain English text, using standard letters, numbers, and common punctuation (what's technically called GSM-7 encoding), fits up to 160 characters in a single part. Go over that, and the message splits into multiple parts — each one billed separately. Where it gets less obvious: certain characters — some accented letters, emoji, some non-Latin script — force the whole message into Unicode encoding, which allows only 70 characters per part instead of 160. A message that looks short on screen can quietly split into two or three billed parts if it's using the wrong kind of characters, and most people composing on a phone have no easy way to know that's happening until the bill reflects it.
FaithDash's composer shows this live while typing — character count, whether the message is being encoded as GSM-7 or Unicode, how many parts that translates to, the cost per message, and the total cost for whichever recipient group is selected — all before you hit send. That live counter exists specifically because the parts-and-encoding rule is confusing and easy to trip over by accident, not because the pricing itself is complicated.
Where a generic bulk SMS portal fits into this
Pricing across the category of generic bulk SMS platforms operating in Uganda — names like EgoSMS, SMSOne, Trust SMS Uganda, RedSMS, Oracom, FamITech — is broadly the same shape: pay-as-you-go per SMS unit, sometimes with volume bundles, because every one of them is ultimately buying delivery from the same kind of telco-connected infrastructure FaithDash uses. None of them is meaningfully cheaper per SMS as a structural matter, because none of them controls the underlying telecom cost any more than FaithDash does. The honest comparison isn't about price at all — it's about what you get wrapped around that price. A generic portal gives you a composer and a list you upload yourself. FaithDash gives you the same per-part cost, applied to a recipient list that's already your live member database, segmented by tag, with reminders that can fire automatically without you re-sending anything by hand.
How it's actually paid for
FaithDash bills from a prepaid church balance — a wallet, topped up through mobile money (MTN or Airtel, via Flutterwave), not a fixed monthly package or bundle. Every SMS part draws down that balance at UGX 35 per part, whatever the message, whoever it's going to. The Billing page shows the current balance, total topped up all-time, total spent all-time, a last-30-days breakdown by channel, and a full transaction ledger — so the UGX 35 figure isn't an abstract number quoted somewhere, it's traceable against every message the church has actually sent.
The honest bottom line
FaithDash doesn't claim to be the cheapest way to send an SMS in Uganda, and it shouldn't — the per-part cost is the market rate, the same rate underlying every bulk SMS platform operating in the country, because they're all ultimately buying the same kind of telecom delivery. What's worth paying attention to instead is where that UGX 35 goes to work — a message typed once, sent to the right people automatically, without a spreadsheet in between.
If you've never actually watched the character counter move while typing a church announcement, it's worth composing one just to see it — it explains the pricing better than any article can.