About CharLimit.net

CharLimit.net exists for one specific moment in writing: when your text is about to meet a limit that will cut it, bill it, or bury it. Every tool here is a live checker against a real cutoff — the 280 characters of an X post, the 2,200-character Instagram caption cap, the 160-or-70-character SMS segment budget, the 100-character YouTube title field, and the ~160-character search-snippet window. That is a deliberately narrower brief than a general word counter, and it shapes everything about how the site works.

Built around limits, not totals

A general-purpose counter answers "how much did I write?" — this site answers "will it fit, and what happens if it doesn't?" Those are different questions with different mechanics. Fitting inside a limit depends on how the platform counts (X weighs every URL as 23 characters and most emoji as 2), on what encoding your characters force (one curly apostrophe moves an SMS from a 160-character budget to a 70-character one), and on where the platform truncates the visible part long before the hard cap (Instagram's "…more" fold, Google's pixel-width snippet cut). So each checker pairs a live remaining-count meter with the fine print of its specific platform, and the page copy spends its words on the quirks that actually change outcomes.

Who this is for

The people who hit these limits professionally: social-media managers drafting posts that must not truncate mid-hook, SMS senders whose per-segment billing turns character math into real money at campaign scale, video creators fitting searchable titles into a truncating results page, and writers shaping meta descriptions that end before Google's ellipsis. If you just need word counts, reading time, or writing analytics for prose, our sister sites WordCntr.com and WordCounterPro.ai are built for that; CharLimit.net stays focused on limits.

Limits change; this site says so

Platform caps are policy, not physics. X doubled its limit from 140 to 280 in 2017 and now sells longer posts to subscribers; display truncation points shift with app redesigns. The figures on each page reflect the platforms' published rules as of mid-2026, are re-checked against platform documentation, and every page tells you plainly when a number is a hard cap, a billing boundary, or a drafting convention — and to verify against the platform itself before a consequential send. CharLimit.net is independent and is not affiliated with any of the platforms or carriers whose limits it checks.

Nothing you type leaves your browser

Drafts checked here are often unpublished campaigns, embargoed announcements, or customer messages. All counting and segmentation runs as JavaScript in your own browser: no upload, no logging, no account, no server that ever sees your text. You can verify this in your browser's network tab — typing generates zero requests.

Part of the Sumvia network

CharLimit.net is published by Sumvia, the team behind the Sumvia.net utility network. The counting engine is small, typed, and covered by automated tests — including the GSM-7 alphabet table and segment arithmetic — as described on the methodology page. Found a limit that moved, or a count that looks wrong? The contact page explains how to report it; confirmed corrections ship with a new test so they cannot regress silently.