Paste or type your text. Character counts update instantly, with or without spaces.
Character limits are everywhere and they're all different: 280 for a post on X, 150 for an Instagram bio, roughly 155 characters before Google truncates a meta description, 160 for a single-segment SMS, 30 for a Google Ads headline. This counter exists so you can write against those ceilings in real time instead of pasting into the platform and hoping.
Not all "characters" are equal. An emoji like 👨👩👧 is a single visible glyph but several Unicode code points joined together — and platforms disagree on how to bill you for it. X counts most emoji as two characters; SMS silently switches the whole message from 160-character GSM encoding to 70-character UCS-2 the moment one emoji appears. That's why a "159-character" text with a single 😊 can split into three billed segments.
Google truncates descriptions by pixel width (~920px on desktop), not a fixed character count. 155 characters is a safe rule of thumb because wide letters (W, M) eat more of the budget than narrow ones (i, l). Front-load the value proposition in the first 120 characters so the part that matters survives truncation on mobile.
Everything is computed in your browser as you type. Draft tweets about unannounced products, ad copy for embargoed launches, or personal messages — nothing is uploaded, logged, or stored.