Twilio and Plivo are sub-penny (USD$0.01) per message - for most of NA. International gets a bit more but in USA is cheap.
Isn't that because in the US the receiver of the SMS also pays?
That’s actually relatively cheap, considering SMS prices used to be much higher than that until the EU enforced a hard limit of 10ct per SMS as maximum price.
In what universe is 9 ct for a couple bytes over the wire cheap?
In the context where, until recently, it was 25ct+ for the same 140 bytes.