To enter their phone number because you sent an SMS to them.

So if there are any costs for sending this SMS it’s on you.

> So if there are any costs for sending this SMS it’s on you.

It's a $0/month e-mail service.

If the price of entry is a single text message, I think that's fair.

We both know they harvest the data and still they are too cheap to pay for the SMS

    There weren’t any infrastructure costs to sending the first SMS ever,

Hah. Someone wasn't alive for the 90s.

Someone didn’t read all of the words ^_^

Infrastructure costs were marginal, near 0,

because SMS was just 140 bytes of text stuffed into already-occurring network traffic

between phone<->telco.

I did some work with Verizon and an IoT customer was asking about SMS pricing and the VZ guys laughed and said it cost less than a penny for every 1M SMS.

    the VZ guys laughed and said it cost less than a penny for every 1M SMS.

Didn't stop them from charging $0.10 per text message in the 2000s and earning a fortune.

Yep, bastards!

and that’s only because an accountant demanded a cost of goods sold!

Continuing that behavior until everybody’s grandma had iMessage, is a large portion of why I don’t trust a telco!

(Not building out the full range of rural etc network they promised to, while cashing all of the government subsidies, struck me wrong as well.)

Exchanging SMS messages with any sort of reliability (like not losing your messages when you go through a tunnel) requires running an SMSC. That costs money.

Furthermore, carriers still charge each other for exchanging SMS traffic, though many of them just charge the difference rather than sending each other bills.

This approach is quite costly if you're out of the country, though. Sending an SMS is hit and miss when roaming in foreign enough networks, and each SMS can cost you a significant amount for exchanging 10 characters. Even receiving SMS messages far away from home can cost you money, which is a pain if you have a relative that could never get used to modern messaging services.

Are you one of the unfortunate souls I mentioned?!

PS Has the bio trap snared any robots yet?!