Is there any reason, beyond corporate greed, for SMS messages to cost so much?
If I get it right, an SMS message is just a short string of data, no different from a message we send in a messenger. If so, then what makes them so expensive? If we’d take Internet plans and consider how much data an SMS takes, we should pay tiny fraction of a cent for each message; why doesn’t that happen?
Pay-as-you-go is still popular in poorer markets, more rural areas or even in pro-competitive markets. It’s only particularly scummy markets that force customers to use their credit within a certain time period so for those who only rarely call/text and have consistent access to wifi, even 5-10 dollars worth of credit can last a year or more. Extremely consumer-friendly.
Yeah, I’m within the reach of wifi almost constantly. Only need to call or send an SMS very rarely, so I’m quite happy to just have credit as backup. I get the feeling my provider would really love to get me on some monthly plan, but that ain’t happening if I can help it.
I rode a prepaid plan like that for about 5 years, it’s honestly great. Everyone thought I was crazy when I said it cost me to text them lol but my cost was maybe ~$1/month. Now I’m on 50GB of data, but I travel almost constantly so it was finally worth it.
For such limited usage, it’s absolutely not worth monthly. Unlimited for X amount is only good value if you’re making enough use out of it to outweigh the cost of PAYG. I used to travel for work and even at a bargain price of ~$10 for 20GB/unlimited/unlimited, I was only really using my data for Spotify while driving so come the end of the monthly cycle, I’d have an evening of watching YT or whatever else on my data since I’d still typically have about half left.
Worst is it gets you into the mindset of “I have this much for the month so I might as well use it” and influence you to use it more. I don’t want that.