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Every message has two prices: what you charge the customer, and what the vendor charges you. They are settled at different points in the message’s life, and the difference is the margin.

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Where each side is settled

Price — at ingress

Per inbound submit_sm. Depends only on the customer’s tariff — account, product, destination — never on which vendor is eventually chosen.

Cost — at the vendor

Once a route is chosen and the body is split, because only then is the segment count known.
Each inbound PDU is one billable unit. A concatenated message arriving as three PDUs is three charges, and nothing has to predict segment counts to get the customer’s bill right. Cost is recomputed on every attempt. A message re-routed after a NACK goes to a different vendor at a different cost, and each attempt is costed separately — while the customer is charged once, however many vendors were tried.

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The rate table

Rates use the routing grammar with the amount where routing puts the target:
A [scope] is either a vendor instance name — what that vendor charges you — or an account id — what you charge that customer. Rules are evaluated top to bottom and the first match wins, so a catch-all belongs last. Attributes and operators are the routing engine’s, so anything you can route on you can rate on, including product and systemId. Combine conditions with ~~ in all three positions.
matches is a regex and is anchored. ^61.* matches a full number; a bare 61 does not.And startsWith compares literal text — a regular expression written into it can never be true, so the rule prices nothing and the traffic falls through to whatever comes next.

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The default that everyone should set

[*] prices any account with no rule of its own:
Set it once and every account is priced, including accounts created later. An account’s own rules are tried first and the first match still wins, so anything it carries beats the default — including a bare catch-all, which is what makes a negotiated tariff an override rather than a suggestion.
Without a default, an account nobody has priced is not refused — it sends unpriced and uncharged, with one line at debug.That is traffic given away rather than traffic blocked, and it is the failure the default really exists for. Set it on day one.
It applies to price only, never to cost. A vendor with no cost rules stays unknown rather than inheriting the sale price — otherwise every margin would compute to zero instead of unknown, and nothing would say so. * is reserved: no account or vendor may be named it.

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Unknown is not zero

A rule that matches nothing leaves the amount unknown, never zero. Zero is a real price meaning free, and an unknown side makes the margin unknown rather than wrong. This distinction is why an unpriced vendor shows as a gap in a margin report rather than as 100% profit.

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Precision

Amounts carry at most four decimal places and are parsed exactly, never through floating point. An amount with more precision is rejected rather than truncated — truncating 0.00001 to zero silently gives traffic away. smsg.money.scale (0–4, default 4) controls how many places a total is displayed with. India uses 2.
Rates always keep four places regardless. /secure/rate reports 0.0450; shown as 0.05 that is 11% out on every message, and a customer computing their bill from a quote would be wrong. CSV exports keep four for the same reason — a spreadsheet sums that column.
Storage never changes: amounts are integers of ten-thousandths. The setting is presentation only and can be changed at any time.

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Least-cost routing

A table marked ->function(LCR) picks the cheapest vendor rather than the first matching rule:
The semantics differ from a normal table in a way that matters:
  • Vendors that are down or not accepting are skipped, so the next cheapest carries the traffic.
  • A vendor with no matching rate is used only if nothing else matches — a forgotten rate line degrades rather than causing an outage.
  • Rules pointing at another table are ignored inside an LCR table: a nested cost cannot be compared, and routing at an unknown price would be worse.

Tariffs

Editing rates from the panel, and per-account overrides.

Call records

Where both sides of the trade are recorded.