I mean...that's how SMS used to work? Or still works?

Once upon a time it was expensive to send messages and now it's cheap.

Yeah. Iirc, I used to have to pay $0.20 per SMS message, sent and received, before unlimited plans became a thing. Also had a limited amount of minutes for phone calls.

I remember Verizon wireless at the time had a plan with unlimited nights and weekends for calls and texts, so my friends and I would message each other like crazy on the weekends when it was free. Got grounded when I got my first girlfriend in high school for racking up the phone bill from text messages and promptly got my phone taken away.

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johnisgood 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You had to pay for receiving SMS?

	▲	thewebguyd 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, in the early days, at least in the US, carriers used to charge for both incoming and outgoing SMS unless you had a plan that included it, usually with a limited amount of messages and they were quite expensive for the time.