Different platforms cap text at different lengths, and getting it wrong costs you. The ChrysoKit Character Counter shows characters, words, sentences and a live limit indicator for the platform you are writing for.
Why use it
A counter that shows 'over by 12' is more useful than one that shows '290'. Ours does both.
How to use the Character Counter
- Pick a platform from the presets, or set a custom limit.
- Type or paste your text.
- Watch the counter and the over/under indicator.
- Trim until you fit.
Features worth knowing
Platform presets
X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, SMS, meta description, and more.
Live over/under
Shows exactly how many characters you are over the limit.
Multi-counts
Characters, words, sentences and paragraphs all visible at once.
Pro tips
- Different platforms count emojis differently. The counter assumes the most common interpretation; double-check on the actual platform for borderline cases.
- URLs often count as a fixed length on social platforms even if they are longer. Trim the visible text, not the URL.
- Meta descriptions are shown by search engines around 155-160 characters. Beyond that, they get truncated.
Privacy first. The Character Counter runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to a server.
Paste any draft into the Character Counter before posting. It is the smallest pre-flight check that saves the most embarrassment.
Open the tool: Character Counter →
The campaign that cost double: a character-limit case study
A local business sent an SMS campaign to 4,000 customers: a friendly two-sentence offer, 152 characters, comfortably inside the 160-character single-message limit. The invoice charged for 12,000 message segments... triple the expected 4,000. The culprit was one character: a curly apostrophe pasted from a word processor. SMS encodes in the compact GSM-7 alphabet only when every character belongs to it; one outsider switches the entire message to UCS-2 encoding, where the segment limit drops from 160 characters to 70. At 152 characters, the message split into three segments per recipient.
The same class of surprise appears across platforms in milder forms. A meta description that reads perfectly in a CMS preview truncates mid-promise on Google because the CMS counted characters and Google effectively measures pixel width. A tweet composed at exactly 280 characters fails to post because its link, however short, is counted as 23.
The defence is procedural rather than clever: compose in the counter, paste the final text... not a draft... and re-check after every edit, because limits judge the exact bytes you submit. Counting after the fact is an autopsy; counting during composition is free.