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?
SMS isn’t like e-mail in that it requires specific infrastructure within the network of your carrier, all the way from the cell tower to the inner network routing. The size of the data doesn’t really matter.
There’s a certain value to SMS. It’ll work on any phone, unlike iMessage/Signal/WhatsApp/whatever. It’ll work reliably when the tower is routing a lot of sessions. It doesn’t require third party servers or accounts. Most free alternatives don’t do any of that. With RCS coming to iOS soon, most phones will support something other than SMS soon enough, assuming the carriers will start implementing their own infrastructure again (Vodafone shut down some of their RCS services in various countries, actually).
When it first came out, SMS was actually free, but people were willing to pay for it. Some people still are. I don’t get why people pay for SMS when apps exist that do the same for a fraction of the cost (while providing a much better experience) but here we are.